When I made the move from Windows to Mac I wanted a compression utility similar to what I previously used, WinRAR. A stable, efficient program with a GUI that allowed you to view files inside an archive before extracting, as well as extract/add/delete individual files, and at least ZIP and RAR file support.

The obvious choice was StuffIt, but this was too bloated, buggy and... Windows like ;) for my taste. So I tried every other comparable program I could find (BetterZip, Springy, iArchiver, iShrink). Considering the features mentioned above the choice was between BetterZip and Springy (similar programs in a lot of ways, I advise you to try both).

What really sold me on Springy was something I hadn't thought of; its contextual menu integrated into Finder that allows you to do pretty much everything you need to by just right-clicking on an archive, even viewing the files it contains.

That said there are a couple of features I would like to see. While Springy can read RAR archives, it cannot create them, something BetterZip can do. Indeed this feature has been requested before (try searching on the Springy website forum). What it basically comes down to is the current state of licensing for the RAR format meaning the only solution is very inelegant/inefficient. Still, Zip files are perfectly adequate and of course RAR files can still be read/extracted.

The other point is more simple; I really would like to be able to order the files inside an archive by the different columns in list mode! When you want to find the most recently updated files this can be very useful.

While not perfect, this is the best archiving utility I have found on the Mac, it does everything I want it to do and is very stable. The dev has always been very helpful and responsive whenever I have made feature requests or found bugs.