Space was and still is the final frontier in computing. The hard drives are getting larger and faster day by day, but there are still limitations when it comes to e-mail attachments or files uploaded to different sites.

It's no mistake to say that in these cases every byte counts. One solution is file splitting and the other is archiving, but the right way to win the space race is using their powers combined. Best results when solving a problem are obtained using the best tools, so, while file splitting can be done about the same way by all the splitters, it's a completely different matter when talking about archiving.

There are a lot of good archivers around, with the RAR-ZIP-ACE triad holding the first three positions of the mainstream top. Tests revealed that none of these holds the supreme crown – best compression ratio. The king in this field is UHARC, a command-line program who is still in 0.x version years after its release. It is slow, it doesn't have a graphical interface but does its job perfectly, sometimes achieving compression rates better with 10-20% than RAR or ACE. Since it's a pity to keep such a powerful program away from the masses, people thought of adding it a friendly interface to improve its usability.

These being said, the time has come to present you WinUHA, a potent GUI for UHARC with shell integration. We have to find out three big things about it: compression, decompression and the available options it can offer.
Its interface makes all functions available easily and it could be used as a file browser without any problem.

Compressing a folder requires you to browse for your files and/or folders, select the ones you want to pack, right click and choose Add Selected, change the archiving options if needed, then hit the OK button.

If you use the largest dictionary size you will receive a warning about the memory use. Press OK and pray for it to work. Using the 32MB dictionary size can become a huge improvement in compression rates when packing large files.

Unfortunately, the compression speed is very slow when using it combined with multimedia compression. For example, packing a folder with some files totaling 7.7MB in size resulted in 5.9MB UHA archive and 6.1MB RAR archive. As the size of the data to be compressed increases, the difference will increase accordingly.

Decompression is also an easy thing to do, you just have to enter the archive, select the files you want to unpack and press the Extract To button from the toolbar. Of course, you will have to browse for the location where to extract the files and hit the OK button before completing the task...

Now let's see what options we have available... pretty strange, but when we access the Options item from the Tools menu, we find only two radio buttons which enable us to change the archive preview style. The Info button from the toolbar works only when inside the archive and so does the Verify function. I can't see the use of the UHARC console, since this program is supposed to make it useless. Before ending this, I will add one more interesting and useful feature - it has the same useful shell extensions as WinRAR.


The Good

WinUHA does what it's supposed to do and does it well. It is free for non-commercial use and a huge improvement over UHARC's native command-line control. It has archive encryption capabilities and a clear interface, maybe a bit Spartan. Shell extensions are extremely useful.


The Bad

Some functions are not here yet (and I am not talking only about the "Help To Do..."!), when trying to use the Info button I got some error before being able to see the archive information. The Verify and Info options are a bit strange, you have to enter the archive in order to use them, otherwise they won't work. It only supports the UHA file format, but if you are a compression ratio freak, you won't need anything else.


The Truth

If this would have been a 1.0 version, then maybe some of its weak points could be forgiven, but to put the 2.0 label on a literally helpless program it's no such a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, it's very useful and saves a lot of your precious time, but it didn't reach its gold age yet. I remain faithful to UHARC/GUI when I need to pack something using UHARC, but I know that WinUHA can offer a lot more in the future. It's not the best one around but deserves your attention, if you have some minutes to spare.


Here are some snapshots of the application in action: