BetterZip 1.8

BetterZip is a very nice file compression and decompression tool. Its most important feature is that it allows you to open and extract files without extracting all the files in an archive.

Most other unpacking tools I know on the Mac automatically extract archives, and they don't let you see what is inside the archives. BetterZip behaves more like WinZIP or WinRAR on Windows. Some people may be happy enough with how Mac apps behave, but I agree that BetterZip does something that is sometimes needed.

This application supports the most popular archive formats like ZIP, RAR, 7-ZIP, and TAR, among others. When you open one of these files with BetterZip, you will see its contents. If you need to view one of the files inside the archive, you can simply double click it, and it will be opened using the default viewer on your Mac. This is usually faster than extracting the whole thing just to see a file. But if you are trying to open a movie file inside an archive that only holds that file, the process will be no faster than actually extracting it.

BetterZip can handle compression operations as well. And it works very well. Simply dragging and dropping files to an archive adds them to it. Basically, if you are not satisfied with The Unarchiver, this is a good alternative.