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Review: WinZip 17 stays fresh with cloud storage and social sharing features |
November 02, 2012
It's not easy being WinZip these days. Windows has been able to open and create Zip files on its own for a while now, and free, powerful compression utilities like 7-Zip are readily available and actively maintained. And yet, the 20 year-old utility soldiers on with version 17, delivering impressive utility and showing a keen awareness of the rapidly evolving cloud storage and file sharing landscape. New integration with cloud storage services and social networks gives WinZip a firm foothold in the online world. It's available in $50 Pro and $30 Standard versions, each with a twenty-one-day free trial.
WinZip 17 isn't the first version to feature the Ribbon interface, that strip of large, bold icons that debuted with Microsoft's Office 2007. Not everyone loves the Ribbon, but WinZip has been traditionally toolbar-based, so the Ribbon works well for it. The UI divides ribbon tabs are according to functionality, with clear labels such as Unzip, Edit, Share, Tools, and Settings. WinZip has done some extra work so that when you start the program fresh, the first tab is Create, letting you quickly put a Zip file together—and when you start the program by opening a Zip file, the first tab is Unzip, letting you extract it either locally or to the cloud.
Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive are all deeply integrated into WinZip 17, and their familiar icons show up in several different Ribbon tabs for different operations. The Unzip tab lets you extract files directly into any service without locally browsing for its folder (or even having its client installed). The Edit and Create tabs let you download files from any of the three services and add them to the current Zip, and even shows how much free space you have in each service, so you can better decide where to place the resulting Zip. The Share tab lets you create a Zip file right on a cloud service, as well as quickly email links to any files you already have on the various cloud services.
WinZip 17 (Pro version pictured here) is well-integrated with Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive.
The only point where this new integration doesn't mesh well with legacy functionality is the Email feature in the Share tab. This feature lets you email a link to your Zip file, but works only using ZipSend, a WinZip service that requires its own account. With other services so well-integrated, there's no reason to make you use ZipSend exclusively for this—but to put a Zip file on another service and email a link to it requires a series of different operations (you can still do it, just not as easily).
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013406/review-winzip-17-stays-fresh-with-cloud-storage-and-social-sharing-features.html
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