WinAce
Whether to Zip or ACE
With 100-Gig hard drives selling for less than $100, why would anyone bother compressing files? Well, aside from simple conservation of space, it's often necessary to keep a group of files together for activities such as program installation and sharing files with other users via e-mail or FTP. In addition, compressed file collections can be protected by passwords and their contents verified to avoid corruption.
But once you decide to compress, or archive, your files, you still need to make a choice among a variety of compression formats. While the ZIP format has been a de facto standard among PC users, it definitely isn't the only format, and depending on who you ask, it may not be the best.
WinAce's ability to read a wide range of compression formats with grace effectively obviates the need to make a decision among the formats. It even makes the process of creating and using archived files fast and simple enough that you can put off buying that extra 200GB drive for a few more months.
What It's Made to Do
As an archiver, WinAce does a solid job providing options. The program can deal with a wide variety of different file formats automatically. It handles both viewing and extracting of ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, RAR, ARC, ARJ, GZip, TAR, ZOO, and JAR files. And while the list of archive formats WinAce is able to create is not as extensive as the list of compressed files it can read, you're likely to be able to create the files you need most often, including ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, and JAVA JAR files.
If you have a preference for a particular archive file type, or if you believe the ACE archive format creates smaller files than the Zip format does, you can pick and choose between file types, and even control the ratio of compression versus speed of operation for any particular archiving task.
Working with WinAce
The process of creating an archive is simple enough, and can be done in a number of ways. If you're using WinAce to browse your files, you simply drag your selected files or folders to the selection box. You can accumulate files from multiple folders and drives, and then compress them once you've completed your selection process. Alternately, you can drag files from Windows Explorer to the WinAce icon on your desktop, although we were disappointed that rather than directly adding the files to the "selected" area, WinAce simply opened its folder display.
Far more convenient are WinAce's context menu items, which display when you right-click a selection in Explorer. Selecting the 'Add to XXX.ace' function automatically launches the archiver and compresses your selected files, using a name derived from the file or folder you're working with. It also uses the compression filetype you've selected as your default. Similarly, the 'Compress and email' function launches your default email application with the compressed file attached and ready to send.
The third context menu option, 'Add to...' is the least direct but most flexible, launching a trimmed-down interface with your selected files ready for compression. As with the other options, WinAce provides a derived file name and uses the default compression type, but doesn't automatically execute the compression; rather, you can manage the list of files, change the compression type, change the destination file name, and generally change the compression functions before you actually create the archive.
Exploration
WinAce promotes itself as "possibly the only file browser you will need," meaning you can leave Windows Explorer behind and instead use WinAce for your normal file browsing and management tasks, as well as incorporate working with compressed files as a natural extension of your file management activities. It's an appealing thought, but is it realistic?
We swore off Windows Explorer for a week to determine if WinAce was a suitable replacement, and along the way we performed our normal downloading and working with compressed files. Our first impression was that while WinAce by default doesn't present itself in the same way as Explorer, as we tweaked the views and option settings we found it actually could be made to look and act much like Explorer ... if that's what you really want.
We found it convenient to be able to look through our ZIP, RAR, TAR files, and even MS-CAB files using a single tool. On the other hand, if you're accustomed to browsing folders using Explorer's thumbnail view, you may miss this feature in WinAce. For images, WinAce's Quickview function displays a thumbnail at the bottom of the page, and you can opt to display the image in its own resizable window. But WinAce is unable to preview a range of file types, including PDF, AVI, MOV, and even GIF. For those, it simply displays the ASCII translations, which are all but useless.
Good for What It's Good At
If you deal with archived files regularly, and particularly if you find yourself needing to work with multiple archive formats, WinAce is worth looking into. Its core functions work well and provide feedback on their efficiency in terms of speed of operation and percentage of compression achieved, and the context menu items put the compression functions at your fingertips when working with files in Explorer.
Overall, WinAce presents a solid combination of compression/decompression technology and Windows file management capabilities, although it doesn't particularly stand out in either area.
Pros: Handles a wide variety of compression formats, offers proprietary ACE format with high compression rates, integretiy check for all compression formats and repair functionality for ACE and ZIP archives, extensive file management capabilities (serving as a solid replacement for Windows Explorer), inexpensive
Cons: Built-in image viewer can't display some multimedia formats, including GIF images, PDF files and AVI and MOV movies; ACE format faces uphill battle against ZIP and even RAR formats for market share; beginning users will likely find WinZip (and its built-in wizards) to be easier to use.
