100K-Zipper: Small compression...redundant, or genius?

100k-zipper is the compression piece of TinyUSBOffice. Despite the name, the program is actally only 84kb. The program is limited to just ZIP compression, but it handles it fairly well. Obviously, it handles creating new archives as well as extracting from existing archives.

One of the nice things is that it's obviously small and portable. All that's required is the program, and it runs fairly light on resources (1mb RAM idle, around 3mb when working.) Another is that it can display the different files inside of an archive either as Icons, a List, a Report, or Small Icons. The list of files is very intuitive; instead of showing just the names of the files, it also shows the filetype (such as "Opendocument text"), the size, the time (last modified, I assume), the packed size, and the compression ratio. And the last nice thing about it is the option to "Add path". It sounds like you can add a folder, but what it means is that instead of adding files directly to the zip, it will retain the path. For example, if the file is located in C:\My Documents\Monkey\FreewareWire.txt, it will add FreewareWire.txt to the subfolders My Documents\Monkey\ inside of the ZIP file. There is also a directory navigator side panel.


There are a few reasons that make 100K-Zipper less than perfect. The first is that it accepts any file as a ZIP file. That means, if you open an EXE, it won't know the difference, and if you may accidentally overwrite a program, or a document, or what have you. Another downside is that you can't just Add/Append to an existing ZIP, which means you have to extract and start from scratch if you want to add just one file. The very MOST ANNOYING PART of 100K-zip is the annoying "overwrite" warning. It pops up when you do almost anything (besides opening an existing file.)

The way the file selection is set up, you choose files from one directory, then hit "Add" again, then select from a second directory, and so on and so forth. But every single time you hit the "Add" button, the "overwrite" warning pops up, even though it should only popup for the first time. It almost made me think that all the files I wanted to add had to be in the same directory.


Finally we come to closing. Like, literally. In order to "close" a zip file, you just close 100K-Zipper. Until you do, you'll get a "Corrupted archive" warning every time you try to open the archive you're working on.

Overall, it's a nice little app for being so small and handling ZIP files. Maybe not an ideal main compression program, but for on the go, it zips wonderfully.

Visit 100K-Zipper (QuickZipDev) website for download