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The file compression service on your Mac is a bit poor. At best you can select a file or folder to compress and hit a button. That’s about it. Today’s app which I am going to review is called Springy. Its an app designed to help you compress and extract a large number of files on folders. The difference with this app is you get to pick which files you want to extract and compress. Its well built and well designed, and I think this app might be very useful.

Compressing Files

Springy is the sort of application that should be included with the operating system. It has a very simple interface, yet has hundreds of little features which make it a well rounded application. When you run the program you are asked to create an archive (you can turn this off if you don’t need it). As mentioned it has a large focus on making and extracting compressed files such as zip, rar etc. Once as you have chosen a location for your archive you can begin adding files to the archive. You can add files through the file window, or dragging them into the window. You are then given the option of how you want to compress the files, and the level. The higher the compressing the smaller the file size, but the slower the file will run. You can also just store files which is very useful when you want to send files over the Internet.

When you add files to the archive (you can add as many or as little as you want) they are automatically compressed. You build your archive as you go along. This give you a lot of power over how the archive is built. Plus if you forget anything or make a mistake, it is really easy to remove a file, you just delete it out of the archive.

Extracting Files

Extracting files is just as easy as adding them to the archive. You can either drag files out, use the button on the toolbar, or extract all of the files out (again using a button on the tool bar. This will extract the files to your chosen destination. Since this app is designed to add and remove files, you can also add files to an existing archive, which makes it very useful as you generate files that need archiving.

Other Features

Everything is done through the single window show in the screen shot above. This make learning and understanding the application very simple. I picked up how to use this app in a couple of seconds. Other than the adding and extracting of individual files there is also a whole load of other options. As you can see there is the an image being rendered in the screen shot above, this also extends to being given more information when in column view, very similar to Finder.

You also get a search feature, which is useful for large archives. There is also a right click contextual menu, which I didn’t test but provides a shortcut for using the application. You can also add encryption (not sure of the length of the security keys but it will probably be strong), splitting of files into multiple archives of specific sizes. There is also the ability to edit files while it is in the archive, which could be very useful if you have just realised you have cocked something up before sending it some one.

Overall this is a brill app. There is a great deal of control on how you use your archives. It is not a simple matter of adding files and having to re-do it every time you go wrong. You can now control indiviual files and folders while you use your archive. Its a lot better than using the disk utility built into Mac OS X.

The only problem with this app is that doesn’t look very nice. The website has a beautiful design and I was expecting an application to match, however i’m just being picky. It also doesn’t have rar support when making archives, which is slightly annoying, it does have support for extracting files however.

I recommend you download and try this app out, it is really good and useful. It cost $19.95 which is a reasonable price for what you do get, but you would need to make and use a lot of archives to full justify the cost.

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