Now, a year later, the problem is at last solved. In September 2001, Aladdin released StuffIt 6.5, still without support for long filenames. If that name gets munged, the application likely won’t work.
#Stuffit deluxe sit mac os x#
Even if an application’s name is short, an application file in Mac OS X is often actually a package (essentially a special folder), and one of the many files inside it might have a long filename.
#Stuffit deluxe sit full#
That might be annoying by itself, but keep in mind that Mac OS X is full of filenames you can’t normally even see.
#Stuffit deluxe sit archive#
Expanding an archive containing long filenames would change those names into something shorter. In the case of StuffIt, the problem was particularly serious, because it turned an archive into a kind of roach motel: long filenames could go in but they couldn’t come out. Some programs, such as Microsoft Office, couldn’t (and still can’t) deal with long filenames even under Mac OS X. But most users didn’t actually encounter long filenames until Mac OS X, where such names could at last be assigned in the Finder and when saving – in appropriately written programs, that is. The restriction on how long the name of a file could be had been lifted from 31 to 255 characters when HFS+ arrived over 4 years ago, and high-level programming APIs to deal with long filenames were provided starting with Mac OS 9.
Like so many other early Mac OS X programs, StuffIt at this time had various shortcomings, but the most glaringly obvious was its inability to deal with long filenames. Often I’d check back on the Web site to find a second version, compressed in some other way – as a gzipped disk image to be opened and mounted with Disk Copy, for example – because users had found that the StuffIt-compressed version wouldn’t work for them. But every now and then I’d download an application, expand it with StuffIt Expander, and find the result unusable. There was just one problem: It didn’t work. That’s why when Mac OS X came out in March of 2001, I was glad to see a Mac OS X-compatible version of StuffIt Expander included in the Utilities folder. Archive a file or a folder and presto, it takes up less space on your hard disk and less bandwidth when transmitting it over the Internet. If I’m right, and if you’ve been a Mac user for any length of time, then of all the good old workhorse utilities you depend on without even thinking, surely Aladdin’s StuffIt is the one you take the most for granted. Perhaps you’ve never been tight on disk space and perhaps you’ve always lived in some remote hermitage with no desire to share files with others.
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