Compact Pro
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|
| Developer(s) | Bill Goodman, Cyclos |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
1.52 / 1995
|
| Development status | Discontinued |
| Operating system | Classic Mac OS |
| Type | File Compressor |
| License | Shareware |
| Website | Compact Pro |
Compact Pro is a software data compression utility for archiving and compressing files on the Apple Macintosh platform. It was a major competitor to StuffIt in the early 1990s, producing smaller archives in less time, able to create self-extracting archives without the use of an external program, as well as being distributed via shareware which greatly helped its popularity. A PC version was also available, ExtractorPC. Neither program is actively supported.
When it was introduced in the early 1990s, Compact Pro (originally known as "Compactor") competed against StuffIt, which had been suffering from neglect after its original developer moved on. Compact Pro sported a clean interface and a variety of new features which quickly made it a favorite among the digerati. It quickly drove StuffIt from the leadership position and became very popular on BBS systems.
StuffIt 3.0 "fought back" with an even more powerful compression algorithm, a shareware version called StuffIt Lite with most of the same features, and the freeware StuffIt Expander which could decompress StuffIt archives and CompactPro archives. Compact Pro never really regained its momentum. It maintained a niche among loyal users and as a preparation tool for Cyclos's "Smaller Installer" delivery package (which was notably used by Ambrosia Software), but disappeared from the market by the late 1990s.
Compact Pro also served as the inspiration for ZipIt, a PKZip-compatible archiver that was expressly designed to look and work like Compact Pro.
Like most archiver systems, Compact Pro's primary purpose was to package up and compress files for transmission, then extract them again on the other side of the link. Unlike most systems, Compact Pro used a non-modal Mac-like UI that was widely lauded in the press.
Some of the more notable features included the ability to extract everything from an archive by double-clicking on it in the Finder with the ⌥ Option key held down, and automatically recognizing and converting BinHex formatted files back into native format without a separate step. Compact Pro also featured an easy-to-use system for splitting files into parts to fit on floppy disks, a feature that most archivers implemented in an external program, if at all. An odd, but oft-used, feature was the ability to include images and notes that would display when the archive was opened, using the same basic mechanism as TeachText.
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