StuffIt

StuffIt is a family of products for compressing and archiving of data of Smith Micro Software. The best known and oldest program of this family is the data compression program DropStuff, which was originally developed in 1986 by Raymond Lau at the age of 15 years for use on the Apple Macintosh. StuffIt is available for Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and Linux. With DropStuff packed files end get sit or sitx recently.

The DropStuff program in its standard version, which has been always given for free as shareware, is only 30 days time limited operational since 2005.

The supported file formats are not only dependent on the version, but also on the platform. Only the Windows and Linux versions currently support ARJ files, only the Mac version CompactPro files and Shrinkwrap & Disk Copy images.

History

Until Mac OS 9.2.1 the compression format SIT was predominant on the Macintosh. The raison d'être of a specific Mac OS program lay in the allocation of files in Resource and Data Fork. With the introduction of Mac OS X from 2000, the ZIP format as well as the container format DMG Apple was adapted and used. The StuffIt Expander was supplied by Apple up to and including Mac OS X 10.3, but is only going to get since Mac OS X 10.4 from the manufacturer. Since that time, the. Sit and. Sitx format has increasingly lost importance.

Distributor was until 2003 the company Aladdin Systems. Since 26 July 2004, the company Allume Systems calls. On July 5, 2005 by Smith Micro Allume Systems was bought software.

Since StuffIt 7 is a Windows version is available, with the exception of version 10