The Unarchiver for Mac is a free archive unpacker program for your OS X. It is used to decompress and extract various archived files. The Unarchiver is the best free decompression tool for Mac, it supports amazing amount of formats.
This is not just any decompression tool, it is one of the most popular decompression application on Mac OS X and it even comes up in the ten most popular free application in the Mac App Store.
The Unarchiver for Mac is particularly useful and essential because the inbuilt Archive Utility in Mac OS X does not support many common formats. Its nice that Apple has provided us with a file compression and decompression tool that is inbuilt, but this app is not able to deal with most of the popular formats like .rar, .7zip etc.
Therefore I would recommend that you download The Unarchiver application, if you want to extract any of the other formats other than those that are supported by the in built application. If you download files from the web, there is a high probablity that the file will be in .rar or .7zip format as these formats generally offer a better compression ratio that .zip format. And the built-in utility sadly ignores these format. Hence, The Unarchiver.
Once you install this software, it will automatically associate archive formats with itself. So, if you download a rar file, it will show up icon of The Unarchiver, and double clicking on it will start Unarchiver which will automatically extract that file.
How to install The Unarchiver For Mac:
Click on this link to view this application in the App Store and download it. This will take you to the Mac App Store’s web page from here you will be able to open up the application in the App Store by clicking on the View in App Store as pointed out in the screenshot taken below.
In the App Store just click intall button and enter the required details. The download shall start in a while. If you are running a version on Mac OS X that does not have an App Store, then click on this LINK to download The Unarchiver. Unzip the application and put it in the Application folder and you are done with the installation.
Features:
- Offers much needed functionality for Mac OS X with its ability to decompress most of the popular formats. With its awesome minimalistic interface. And is sort of a necessity as the in-built app does not support most of the popular compression file formats. It also supports many languages: Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German, French and Portugese. So it can handle filenames that were created with non-English version of an operating system.
- It only decompress files; does not offers the ability to compress files. This is its only drawback, but its popularity proves that the general users need a decompression software more than a compression software (probably because they can use in-built utility and compress to .zip format). It also supports certain split files like .rar archives.
- Here is a list of file types that are supported by app: Amiga DCS Disk Archive (.dcs), MacBinary (.bin), CPIO, Compact Pro (.cpt), Gzip (.gz), Amiga xMash Disk Archive (.xms), Comic book archive (.cbz, .cbr), Amiga LhF (.f), Amiga Disk File, LHA, Unix Compress (.z), Amiga PackDev Disk Archive (.pkd),BinHex (.hqx), 7z (.7z), Zip, Windows Self-Extracting (.exe), Bzip2 (.bz2, .tar.bz2, .tbz2, .tb2), RAR, HA (.ha), GNU Tar (.gtar), RPM, Unix Compress Tar (.taz, .tar-z), DiskDoubler (.dd), Tar, Amiga LZX (.lzx), Amiga DMS Disk Archive (.dms), CAB, Pax (.pax), Self-Extracting Archive (.sea, if the format itself is supported), Amiga Zoom Disk Archive (.zom), StuffIt (.sit, .sitx), and many more.
Verdict:
The Unarchiver for Mac is the best at what is does. It is one of the most popular application on the App Store and adds much needed functionality to Mac OS X, so that you can deal with the compressed files like .7Zip, .RAR etc which are really common these days. This acts just like the inbuilt utility and sort of feels like it is a part of the operating system. The application is really fast, light weight and simple to use.
