Well, I feel a little out of step with all of the complaints, but this product is great. It has the feel of the OS 9 days when Stuffit had no competitors and was doing a great job at keeping customers happy. Expander has good preferences (surrounding folder as an option, etc.) works well on all sorts of encoded files, including base 64 and zip (zip with no license requirement as in the past, how cool is that?). As a test I dropped in an email containing a compressed file. If you looked at the source you saw base 64 code (normal for email source) with the standard beginning and ending headers and footers. Expander skipped the text and found the encoded part and unencoded it perfectly. No complaints.

Expander is great for unencoding files from the developers who insist on using .sit files and hqx encoding. Why are they still doing that? And it does well with unix archives as long as you don't need to keep the original file permissions. If I did not know the command line I would probably purchase Stuffit Standard or Deluxe. But that depends on whether those programs were trying to take over OS X, like they did several years back when I quit using Stuffit.

Here are some things to consider about my archiving style: (1) I don't use Stuffit for compressing. For that I use the built in the archiver in OS X or the command line Darwin tools. (2) I don't use Stuffit for expanding unix archives where I want to keep file permissions. Duh! (3) I normally don't use it to unzip files, but instead use the Finder for that, although Expander is fine for unzipping.