Boutros Boutros-Ghali, now there’s a silly name. Canaan Banana, that’s another one. Both eminent men in their time and would presumably have met at some point. Baden Baden’s name is so silly they named it twice and to be more accurate it ought to be Baden Baden, Baden. So what about Gumby 50c?

What? Never heard of just about the last remaining free utility for Mac OS X that will make compressed, multi-segment archives? Better look to download it from here then.

Get Stuffed

Back in the good old days real men computed with mice, leaving the PC dinosaurs to clunk along in a twilight world, half DOS, half Windows. Then, the Mac had a steady stream of free compression programs such as Compactor and Disc Doubler. Most were able to make segmented archives which were useful in those days of 56k modems and hard disks with no more space than on an MP’s expenses claim.

Unfortunately, these useful utilities fell one by one, leaving only the venerable Stuffit to take up the strain. As is usual in a monopoly, prices rose and quality lowered such that when Apple wrote an easy front end on their utilities for creating and opening Zip archives in OS X, most Stuffit users told Stuffit to get stuffed.

The one little glitch being that Mac OS X doesn’t have an easy GUI way to make segmented archives. There used to be, as part of Disk Tools, but that feature got left out somewhere around 10.3. Other paid-for programs will do it all but it’s that word ‘paid’ that we are trying to avoid.

Here come the choppers

So you will be relieved to discover that enterprising programmers have opened to door to new ways of archiving. Some, such as DMGConverter and Chop DMG, give Apple’s hdiutil command-line tools a GUI face for hardened mouse clickers.

Gumby 50c on the other hand, takes a whole different approach and wraps 17 utilities into one tiny package.

For my requirements, only the RAR coder/decoder was needed to convert a 700MB file into 70 chunks small enough to send through an iDisk that was chewing on anything larger than 10MB.

Gumby 50c’s interface is a little erratic mainly as it supplies half a dozen ways to do the same task.

As well as the on-screen window with tabs at the bottom and tiny labels…

…the top menu bar has the same choices:

Then there are the Contextual menu options listing the same, plus the alternatives found by pressing the Option key. For example: the window for RAR archives normally shows the UnRAR options. To create a new RAR archive the choices aren’t displayed until the Option key is pressed.

RAR archives are based on proprietary data formats developed by Eugene Roshal (Roshal ARchives). In the Gumby 50c the archives can be opened by many decompression utilities including the free Stuffit Expander. This includes multi segment archives as long as box is ticked to make the Old style of archives. This is presumably because the RAR library is free up to version 2.8 but after a rewrite RAR 2.9 archives and later use a different library which hasn’t been released as free sofware.

The only concern with Gumby 50c is that development seems to have stalled. The website shows that version 2 is underway but that was back in August 2007 when an Alpha release was promised “next weekend”. Perhaps if we all wish very hard and maybe plonk some Paypal their way, Gumby’s developer will pick up the reins again.