Windows

WobZIP

Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 | One Comment

I’ve downloaded quite a few ZIP files during my time as an Internet user, and I know I’m only going to download more of them. Despite the fact that compressed file formats have been around for a long time, there are still people that don’t quite understand them or know how to treat them. They may expect to just open them up and follow an installation procedure, but it doesn’t always work that way. Even if you have some desktop software that you use to unzip compressed files, you still might want to check out an online service that unzips files online called WobZIP. 

What’s unique about WobZIP is that you don’t even have to download the compressed file in order to unzip it because the service enables you to unzip files from your computer and files from URLs. This makes it easy for people who don’t know much about compressed files to actually use them. A number of popular formats are supported, and the files are even scanned for viruses so that you don’t download anything that could end up harming your computer.

  • marc

    Brandon,

    Let me see if I understand this. WobZIP allows you to upload a file from your disk to it, uncompresses it, and then sends the files back to you. And this is so a file you probably either downloaded already or one compressed yourself can be decompressed without having the software, software which almost everyone has these days already on their machines. So you are going to spend the time for the files to be uploaded from your machine to theirs (or uploaded from a remote machine to theirs), made larger (well, usually larger), and then sent in this new state to your machine. DAMN that seems like a huge waste of time. About the only benefit I can possibly imagine in this service is you may not end up with the original zip files clogging your hard drive. The down side to it all is that you are spending MORE time getting the files to your machine due to their increased uncompressed size.

    One other statement (“This makes it easy for people who don’t know much about compressed files to actually use them.”) makes no sense to me. WInZip is, to me at least, is one of the simplest to use compression programs around (although maybe someone with my years of experience would be a bad judge of that). Do you actually think that some one who doesn’t know much about compressed files would be able to figure out WobZIP any easier than WinZip or that such a person would understand what a URL is? WobZIP did give me the option of zipping the file back up and sending it to me all zipped (I am assuming with the directory structure included).

    And, as for easy, after I used WobZIP, it left me with links to the multitude of files that were in my zip file and I would have to click on each file to download it, recreating any directory structure inherent in the compressed file as I went along. By what definition of ‘easy’ do you go by?

    As for the scanning for viruses ability, WinZip has had that ability for many years. WobZIP (which in it defense is still in development) gave me the error message: “An unknown error had occurred while scanning for viruses.” Very helpful and user friendly.

    File compression was created for a number of reasons (back up and restore, reduced file transfer time, software distribution, efficient record storage and retrieval) but the common thread for most of these are reduced file size for transmission and/or storage and directory structure recreation, both of which are lost or complicated by this tool.

    I believe this is another example of a really neat idea that can be done by computers but which serves no real purpose. Its cool that it was done, but I can’t imagine a need for it.

    - Marc