7zX Editor's Review

7zX is a powerful archive builder, supporting multiple archive formats such as TAR, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, UNIX compress, 7z, and S7Z.

The program works only if you drag and drop a file/folder that you want to compress onto its .app directory. In a short time, a graphical user interface pops up. The available settings are: the compression level, preserving or not the Macintosh resource forks, building a Self-Extracting archive, setting a password (if the archive is required to be encrypted), setting the volume size (if the archive needs to be divided), as well as some additional parameters.

The Self-Extract (SFX) engine builds the whole archive as an application. This SFX application extracts a [Content] package. In order to retrieve your data, execute this package. It would be extracted by the SFX application itself and the output would be the archive's contents.

The application provides you the possibility to set the size of the volume. This is a very useful feature if the archive won't fit onto a storage device or it would be too large to use it as an e-mail attachment.

The 'torture test' went fine. I used my 'test_files' directory, a 2.33 GB collection of all kind of file types, including compressed files. It was obvious that the application has the support for multi-threading processing mode, since it used both of my iMac's CPU cores, but it still needs some optimization.

I used the normal compression for this test because I didn't want to test this functionality for a long … looong time. The result was a healthy, 887.2 MB S7Z file, way better than the size of the ZIP file format taken with YemuZIP. The output file for the ZIP format was somewhere around 1.2 GB in that ZIP test. It doesn't support operating mode concurrency, so only one archive would be processed into a compressing operation.

The application outputs by default the S7Z compression type. In order to unleash the power from this application's core, use the program's support for additional parameters. This is not a 'newbie friendly' way to access this functionality, but the producer said than in the future they would implement advanced options that will be available directly from the user interface.

Pluses: is has a strong compression core, it has the support for lots of compression types, it provides a pretty easy to use user interface, it has the support for multiprocessor machines.

Drawbacks / flaws: the advanced options are available just by using command line parameters, it doesn't support archiving concurrency.

In conclusion: this is one of the best archiving tools that I got my hands on. At normal compression level, it outputs a file with decent sizes in a decent processing time. It also provides both, features for beginners and command line parameters for advanced users.

version reviewed: 1.5.3