So, I have been working on a new version for some time now. There aren't all that many visible changes, but as I've made lots of changes to the internals of the code, I've probably introduced some fresh new bugs. Therefore, the version has been bumped to 3.0, so that people can see the scary ".0" and know that there might be a few problems.

To avoid the worst problems, I've made an alpha version available, and would very much like for as many brave people as possible to grab it and try to use it, and report any problems. It should work fine most of the time - I am not aware of any outstanding bugs at the moment - but obviously I alone can not test it under all circumstances. Therefore, please grab it and try it.

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/TheUnarchiver3.0alpha1_64bit.zip

Please don't post it on any software listing sites until it reaches the official release status, though, it is somewhat mean to expose unsuspecting people to unfinished software.

Also, the uploaded version is Intel and 10.5 or greater only, the same that would go on the App Store. The final version will be available for older OSes and PPC, though.

Now, for the change list:

• As mentioned, lots of internal rewrites. The Unarchiver and the command-line tools now use mostly the same code to unpack, unlike earlier when The Unarchiver was stuck with old code. This has probably introduced bugs, so watch out.
• Some UI changes: The icon is now always visible to make it easier to deal with crashes, the file list now shows multi-part archives better, and the password view actually shows the filename of the file.
• It is now possible to explicitly set the encoding for passwords.
• Experimentally added support for never creating an enclosing directory, as has been requested. I am not entirely sure this won't cause problems, though, so it might get removed if it does and can not be easily fixed. Please report experiences with it, good or bad.
• Fixed strange UI lockup that would happen sometimes with password-protected files.
• Full support for WinZip Zipx, including Wavpack and JPEG modes.
• Support for Mac OS X extended attributes in Zip, Tar, and Xar. Also supports setting Spotlight comments from archive comment fields.
• Support for extracting resources from Flash SWF files. Embedded images and sounds can be extracted into separate files.
• Support for Ar and Deb archives.
• Support for self-extracting 7z.
• Support for LBR with embedded crunched and squeezed files.
• Better support for huge Zip files.
• Better support for old StuffIt (thanks to Friendly Archivist),
• Bugfixes for Zip, RAR, Tar, Cpio, HQX, CAB, Zoo, PackIt,

For programmers:

• There is now a XADSimpleUnarchiver class that does a lot of work that XADArchive used to do.
• XADArchive will now use XADSimpleUnarchiver internally. XADArchive is also (still) deprecated, so I am not going to guarantee it will work flawlessly. Feel free to report bugs in XADArchive, but if they are very complicated I might not fix them. New features will not be added to XADArchive either, except those it gets for free through XADSimpleUnarchiver.
• The XADPath interface has changed in various ways, some of them backwards incompatible. Hopefully nobody is relying very much on specific features of this class, but if you do, your code might break with the new version. If you need help fixing it, feel free to ask me.
• Archive entries now have a XADIndex field for easy ordering. There are also new fields giving the index of the next and first solid entry.