StuffIt SDK for Macintosh

The StuffIt SDK 2009 for Macintosh provides developers with C interface to incorporate support for creation/encoding, expansion/decoding, as well as browsing and manipulations of archives in over 30 supported formats. The SDK performs five major functions: determining file types based on their contents; creating archives from original files (encoding, stuffing, compressing), re-creating original files from archives (decoding, unstuffing, expanding), manipulating items within existing archives (moving, renaming, deleting archive items, and adding new items), and browsing archives content. The SDK's design is based on conflicting goals: Provide flexible control over details of decoding, encoding, browsing and manipulating processes Provide unified interface for all supported formats Provide the same public C interface for multiple platformsFor more runtime control, the SDK has an option of using notifications and callbacks mechanism. The SDK includes sample application projects and sources to assist the user on how to perform the five major functions. The SDK provides a C interface via a framework library. The StuffIt SDK supports Mac OS X 10.4 and higher and was designed to work with Xcode 2.5 and higher. To improve compression/expansion performance SDK has an option to create optimum number of threads per operation on machines with multiple processors and/or hyper-threading processors. Thus, SDK will create four threads for a single compression operation on a machine with four processors. On average you will see 20% to 85% time improvement compare to single thread compression depending on the machine characteristics and a number of processors. StuffIt SDK multi-threading implementation is based on PThreads and uses QpThread library designed and implemented by Pavel Krauz Copyright (C) 1999. The thread library is free software and distributed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). Key Features and BenefitsAdditional Format Support NEW! Expansion support for 7z archives NEW! Expansion support for segmented Zip NEW! Expansion support for split archives NEW! Expansion support for LZMA NEW! Browse/extract support for compressed tarStuffIt X Format FeaturesStuffIt X Duplicate Folding™ feature

The StuffIt Engine SDK is a cross-platform suite of APIs allowing a client to access the StuffIt Engine for basic compression and expansion as well as more advanced tasks such as manipulation of an archive's contents.

In order for the SDK to be cross platform, certain data types and object representations needed to be abstracted. Strings and references to file system objects need to be converted from their platform specific types to their respective StuffIt SDK types.

Strings

StringRef is the data type used to expose string functionality in the SDK. A StringRef can be created in a number of ways depending on the platform. For instance, a C string or Pascal string may be used to create a StringRef on Windows or Mac OS X, but only the Mac supports creating a StringRef from the native CFString object.

File System Objects

An FSObjectRef is the sole way of providing objects to the SDK that represent an item within the file system. Similar to StringRefs, creation of an FSObjectRef varies by platform.

Notifications

The SDK uses notifications so that the client can provide it's own progress user interface as well as other interactions that might require user feedback. Updates from previous version.

Version 12 of the StuffIt SDK added specific file formats compressors were added to sitx format to support the following file types: jpeg, mp3, bmp, gif, png, tiff, pdf, psd, jpeg2k, jpeg lossless, pict, ptt5 and pxm.

Version 12 also added zip content recompression option to sitx format. This allows to recompress zip archives content when being added to sitx archive that results in better compression ratio. The zip archive is reconstructed on expansion.