14 DAY TRIAL // This morning, I was thinking about the fact that it becomes harder and harder to find a good archiver to review, but I was struck by a new release of the old timer known as ARJ, bringing a lot of memories with it, more or less pleasant, but I won't stop at that, at least not now. After this great joy that I will share with you later this month, I found an interesting program called ZippHO and within minutes I made my choice: you have to find out more about it today!
This program has reached a mature version number, 3.0.6, has an installation package having a size of 2.6MB and the setup process should be easy for everyone, if you disregard the small problem posed by the Italian words appearing in some places, although the selected language for the setup program is English. You don't have to think about your budget at all when it comes to using ZippHO, because this program is free for personal use. Now, let's check the interface and features ZippHO has been gifted with by its creators!
This program has a common interface, but only at first sight. Once you get to know it better, you will discover some hidden strong points.
First of them is the ability to use skins, but unfortunately, there aren't any built in. Of course, you can download and install skins from the official website. The skins are only applied to the toolbar, but they will change the overall looks of the program enough to be well noticed, I can tell you that!
Now, the last interesting discovery about the interface and ease of use - tabs! Yes, you can have more than one archive opened at a time and the interface will have a nice tab open for each of them. Sweeeet!
The first things to check with an archiver are the supported file types for opening and saving. ZippHO can create and save ZIP, BZ2, TAR and LHA archives, but can open some more popular files for extraction, including ARJ, SIT, CAB, RAR, TGZ or UUE.
Packing and unpacking are done easily, using the toolbar buttons or the Action menu's items corresponding to these two operations. The strange thing with this program is that it doesn't have a contextual menu, but I can't call that an issue.
If you want to view files from an archive, ZippHO has an internal viewer that can view images and text files, at least that's what I've been able to check. If you are into managing your files, there's an excellent Favorites Manager ready to be used inside this program.
At last, the interesting tools are not that many, but can prove quite useful. Just think about testing archives, sending them through e-mail, repairing them and splitting/rebuilding multivolume archives! These sound good, but not enough, and you can get new features using additional plugins. Unfortunately, on the official website, I was able to find only one plugin for creating SFX packages.
I guess this should be everything for now, but I won't leave you without the usual conclusions...
The Good
ZippHO is easy to use, fast, reliable and looks well. I can say that this is the first free archiver that I've seen lately able to keep more than one archive open at a time, which is a great feature, in my opinion. At last - skins and plugins - these are two features that always look good.
The Bad
It was strange to notice Italian word inside the English interface (Totale, Dimensione), but I am sure everyone is able to understand them...The worst part that I've noticed is the lack of any documentation, but this can only get better in the future.
The Truth
ZippHO is on the right path, and I can hardly wait to see its next versions and their improvements. All I can hope for is that this project is not dropped and keeps going on. As far as I am concerned, this program is a worthy choice of a basic free archiving tool for your computer. Get this program and take your time to validate or deny my words, and don't forget to enjoy the process!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
