SoftSquare introduces SaveAll, the SuperCompressor!
Installing SaveAll:
1. If you are a System 6 user, drag the SaveAll™ file to your System folder. System 7 users should put the SaveAll™ file in the Control Panels folder of your System folder .
2. Restart your computer.
3. Open the SaveAll™ Control Panel. A dialog box containing instructions on what to do will appear.
About Saveall
SaveAll is a file compression utility. It can achieve astonishing compression rates of more than 100:1 - on all kinds of files including text. It is specifically designed to compress multiple versions of the same document. Normally you open a document, make modifications, then save. At this point the latest changes become irreversible. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to save the latest changes without destroying the original?
SaveAll allows you to do just that. When you install SaveAll you get two additional buttons in the Open dialog box: Save Version and Get Version. Before you open a document to make changes, you can click Save Version. SaveAll automatically saves the current state of your document to a separate file. Now you can make changes to the document (and save them) without worry — the original is preserved forever. This can be repeated any number of times. Each time you open the document to make changes, you can click Save Version to preserve the current content. As a result, you'll have a complete history of changes for this document.
You can preserve previous versions without SaveAll - by Saving As… under a different name or by duplicating from the Finder. But the whole point of SaveAll is compression. Let's say you have a 100K word processing document. You open it and retype a 1K paragraph, then Save As… under a different name. This will create another 100K document. On the other hand, using Save Version from SaveAll requires only 1K of additional disk space — the amount of data that was actually changed. SaveAll keeps the latest version and all the previous versions of the document in a single highly compressed file. The trick is that any chunks of data common to several versions are stored just once. This way, for any version SaveAll has to store only the difference between it and the previous version.
When you want to get any previous version you click Get Version in the Open dialog. Another dialog appears listing all the available versions. Versions are numbered and dated, and optionally you can name them and attach comments to them. To extract a version as a stand-alone document, just double-click on it.
SaveAll can be used efficiently on all kinds of files - as long as you don't compress them with utilities like StuffIt before using SaveAll. Fortunately, simple built-in compression schemes like the one used in PICT files work fine with SaveAll. You specify which applications you want to use with SaveAll by adding them to a list in SaveAll's Control Panel. These applications will show Save Version and Get Version buttons in their Open dialog boxes. You'll be able to use SaveAll with any files these applications can open.
If a document has just one version, SaveAll can still be used as a plain compression utility. In this case, compression rates are comparable to rates offered by other compression programs. SaveAll's compression is fast and convenient — just double-click on the compressed file in the Open dialog box, it decompresses and opens automatically.
Here's an example of what SaveAll can do. SaveAll's own source code (a text document) went through 65 versions starting at 15K and ending at 170K. All programmers hate to throw away previous versions of source code, so we kept them all. Their combined size was 6 megabytes. Squeezed into a single SaveAll file, they take just 144K. This is less than the uncompressed last version alone!
With this utility, we are introducing the concept of RewardWare. It works like this. This SaveAll demo is fully functional, except that it expires 30 days after installation. If you send us $35, you'll get the regular version plus another 30-day demo. Each demo has a unique ID. The demo you'll get with your order will have your own unique ID. Give it to your friends, upload it to the local bulletin boards, etc. Some of the people who get it will send us $35 to order the regular version. For each such order received, we'll send $10 to you, the owner of this unique ID. How do we know whose demo they used? Demos print the order form for those who wish to order the real thing. Your unique ID is automatically printed on this order form. We get the form in the mail, check the ID against the list of our registered customer's IDs, and send you a check. The concept of RewardWare is fully explained inside the demo's Control Panel. Its purpose, of course, is to encourage further distribution of this software.
