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JavaJones:
You're right, "withdrawn" was probably the wrong word. In fact I believe some products that support FC still exist. I know patent and proprietary technology issues had something to do with its lack of success, but I'm fairly confident it also had a lot to do with 2 issues, both mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

1: FC did not have markedly better compression than JPEG in many situations, and only at higher compression ratios did it start to show real advantages.

2: FC was more computationally expensive to perform than JPEG. In the late 80s and early 90s this mattered a lot more than it does now. It could take several minutes to fractally compress a large-ish image, whereas a JPEG could be done (even then) in at most a few 10s of seconds.

So if you have a technology that is A: Not much better than its major competitors for general use, B: computationally more expensive than generally available competitors, and C: developed, patented, and controlled by few entities who seem to license it much more strictly than competing technologies, I think it's almost a given it's going to fail.

Here's the app I was thinking of that still uses FC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_Fractals

- Oshyan

IainB:
I've just been trying out PeaZip (Sourceforge.net).
It's rather good at what it does. It seems a little less clunky than iZarc, and looks as though it is designed for browsing directories and archiving on the spot as you browse. PeaZip looks/feels more like what I wanted.

Deozaan:
IanB,

Have you tried 7-Zip?

I find it can handle many different formats (including RAR) but actually gets better compression than even RAR using the 7z format.

IainB:
@Deozaan
Have you tried 7-Zip?
--- End quote ---
No, I have only tried a couple of archiving proggies - as a result of learning from taking part in this discussion. I had not planned on evaluating them all!
I have been using WinRAR for years, and just recently tried iZarc, and now PeaZip (out of curiosity).
I found the Wikipedia article on archiving proggies provides an interesting summary and some basis for comparison.

Deozaan:
I had not planned on evaluating them all!-IainB (June 19, 2010, 07:15 PM)
--- End quote ---
;D

I'm not suggesting you try every archive utility out there but I thought you might be interested in 7-Zip since AFAIK (from my personal observations of what sort of zip formats I frequently find online) there are three "major players" (for Windows) in the archive utility field: WinZip, WinRAR and 7-Zip.

Again, AFAIK (and I could be very, very wrong) all the others are more esoteric.

Of those three, I found I like 7-Zip the best. :Thmbsup:

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