#ZipGenius once again in top 20 #zip #utility list for 2022.

ZipGenius is 25 years old but it’s still rocking hard! We just learned that it’s been added among the top 20 zip utilities by the website uCompares.com. This is a great news and it comes just when we had to make some announcements.

ZipGenius X is 70% complete.

While ZipGenius 6 is well alive on the Web, ZipGenius X has shaped up and working fine in our internal builds. It’s looking really promising because now it is a true Windows 11 application: we’re using WinUI 3 and all the modern technologies needed to make a modern Windows application. What is missing, then? We still have to design the new context menu. Microsoft has changed the way to show an application’s items in Windows shell (the right-click menu, to be clear). We can’t reuse the old Delphi code because there will be less but more streamlined entries and better integration with the newly developed command line. This one is truly new and has a special feature: it will be a cross platform application since day 1. The new command line module has been rewritten in C# and Delphi was abandoned in this app, too; we are intensively testing it in order to offer the very same commands and options, in order to flat the learning curve and to avoid breaking old batch procedures that relied on zg.exe.

The HEX Viewer.

The HEX viewer we developed as a part of ZipGenius X still needs some tuning. We are not very satisfied with it because of its performances, so much that we are still considering to rewrite it as an old-school WPF application, a truly native Windows app that still looks blocky as a Windows XP  app. What should  we favor? Performances or appearance? In fact, we would like to favor performances over appearance, even at the cost of having an inconsistent user interface.

Czip X v. 2.0.

We have started the development of the second major version of Czip X. We are considering a rebranding of the application, a name change or something else. This is the consequence of a people confusing the technology (“CZIP”) with the true application (“Czip X”); also we found that the application name is somewhat difficult to pronounce for some people… We will think later to this matter. On the development side: the second major version of Czip X is an Uno Platform app. One user interface, one source code for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS (except for some platform-specific needs). When we will fix something, the fix will be available to every edition of the application. The user interface  now benefits from the NavigationView offered by Windows: no more vertical scrolling on tall screens, no more back/next navigation on horiziontal screens. The user will get all essential settings in just one page but, first of all, he/she will be allowed to compose the archive by adding files and folders… just like it happens in ZipGenius. And the code allowing the composition of the archive is shared with ZipGenius X.

My Own Passphrase.

On June 1st 2022, we launched My Own Passphrase, a website that acts a passphrase generator and as an endorsement to replace passwords with implicitly stronger passphrases. We made it as a website, as a progressive web app (that could be installed locally) and as an extension  for every major browser. We would like to reach everyone because too much people is using bad passwords still in 2022. But MOP is more than this: in order to make browser extensions work well, we created a an API to interact with our collection of dictionaries. We will release the API but we still don’t know if it will be for free or not – maintaining such a project requires a constantly increasing amount of server resources, so we are thinking to sell licenses for the API in order to pay for a better server and to avoid randomly 503 errors. Also, the API has been included both in ZipGenius X and in Czip X v2.