Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

With the launch of this utility, Serge Shestopalov achieved what had become the Holy Grail of Psion programming - the quest to do seamless ZIPping and UNZIPping on the Psion 3a/3c itself. The ZIP format is the standard way to send files and groups of files round the world in the minumum on-line time and it used to be thought that such a powerful compression tool was impossible with the Psion's limited processor power and memory. Not so, and Serge provided the proof.

And now he's gone and done it again with a massively improved Series 5 version. I was looking at v1.00B and was very impressed. PsiZip/S5Zip/RMRZip (depending on your machine and when you downloaded the program) must surely be the best companion program possible to PsiMail Internet or the Messaging Suite and also a real boon to either programmers working on the Psion itself or users running close to the limits of their disk space.

PsiZip and S5Zip are fully working shareware, and no you can't get them from me. Grab your own copies from Serge's web site or from RMR Software. Everything about the application, from the easy installation to the best help screens I think I've ever seen to the intuitive interface just reeks of quality. If you don't like the screen fonts it decides upon, there are 5 zoom levels to choose from, according to taste and whether or not you need to see the Folder field on the right side of the display.

The three main uses of PsiZip and S5Zip will be in zipping

1. groups of files in a single directory for sending to someone else over e-mail
2. groups of files to save space on a Psion disk
3. whole directory trees for distribution of a self-written program

and (just as importantly) in unzipping the results of the items above or some other program downloaded from the net.

In use the program works perfectly. A medium size directory tree (30k of files) zipped to 14k in about 40 seconds on the 3a and a large tree of 500 files occupying half a megabyte zipped to 200k in about 2 minutes on the Series 5. Both of those times seem quite adequate, though once you've started a zipping process there's no way to abort, which seems something of an omission. The Psion's limited processor power is obviously not going to make it into a ZIPping powerhouse, but remember the process is all being driven from a couple of AA batteries whereas your Pentium desk-top is drawing half a kilowatt to do the same job faster!

The Series 5 version is particularly well thought-out, with tabbed dialogs, clear explanations and check boxes, making it even easier to use than WinZIP on my PC. PsiZip and S5Zip are the 'killer' utilities for Psion users of all types throughout the world and Serge deserves lots of respect, lots of registrations, or preferably both.

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