StuffIt Lock-in and e-mail appropriation
As a Mac user (and with a shiny new Mac Pro at my desk, to boot), I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with StuffIt. The fact is that it's a product that I just don't need, and would rather not have installed on my system, but the sad fact is that a lot of Mac files are compressed with StuffIt rather than being zipped, tarred and bzip2'd or gzip'd, or even just stuffed in a compressed .dmg.
Originally I wasn't so bothered, but what made me blog about this today was the fact that I wanted to expand a .sit on my new machine, and I discovered that you cannot now download StuffIt Expander without giving your e-mail address to Allume, and worse than that, without “agreeing” to receive unwanted marketing from them.
But I'm locked into doing this by the fact that other people are using StuffIt. (And why, by the way, is StuffIt Mac twice the price of the PC version? For that matter, how can a compression tool possibly be worth the amount they're charging for it?!)
The e-mail has just arrived, and I've confirmed my e-mail address to them; however, to save others from having to do so, here are some direct links to the downloadable versions:
StuffIt Expander 10.0.2 (OS X 10.3 and later)
StuffIt Expander 8.0.2 (OS X 10.0 to 10.2)
StuffIt Expander 7.0.3 (Classic/OS 9.2.x)
These came from the actual download page, rather than the e-mail based thing.
Hopefully they will work without you having to go through the e-mail sign-up form and then wait for them to spam you later before you can unsubscribe.
I also don't like stuffit, but you can