OVERVIEW:
WinZip continues to push off last year's momentum with version 17 to persuade users that it
remains significant in today's world of computing.
Much of what's under the hood remains solid and hasn't aged. The latest entry builds upon the 64-bit
ZIP engine from 2011 by adding additional OpenCL support for multicore CPUs like Ivy Bridge and
AMD Fusion. But in version 17, WinZip's redesigned ribbon interface and workflow takes the spotlight.
WinZip has opted to simplify the way users manage their archives with a redesigned ribbon. The language
is easier to understand and bears some resemblance to a certain "office" product. Deeply ingrained in
WinZip's application is now a slew of integrative additions to popular cloud services like Dropbox,
SkyDrive, and Google Drive. WinZip acknowledges that users rely on many different online storage
services, some even two or three, and aims to defragment the workflow of having to go to different
places to manage files and accounts. By enabling direct access to these services from within its own
interface, WinZip 17 lets you easily access and upload your archived files. It's a welcome addition on
top of the encryption measures that come with the application. Archives and accessing multiple cloud
accounts from one location felt seamless and worked well once logged in to all relevant accounts.
On the downside, users who don't have pro accounts or are working with large files will find this
feature limiting. All three supported cloud services, along with ZipSend, come with file size caps at
anywhere between 25MB to 50MB for the free accounts. If you want to take advantage of these
services to send and upload larger files, you must set up premium accounts on your own.
WinZip 17 also includes a built-in file converter and image-resizing presets. When adding photos to
archives, users can opt to set a default image size for any photos added to the archive. We can imagine
this feature being quite useful for sending large volumes of high-resolution photos over e-mail.
Documents can also be converted to PDFs, complete with custom watermarks.
One other feature that makes a return is the social-sharing option within WinZip: users can broadcast
their ZIPs and archives to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The feature works about as well as in the
previous version, but also lacks some critical functions we were hoping to see: you still can't tag friends
or call them out specifically from within the WinZip interface, and there's not much integration with your
Facebook account outside of posting a status update with the link. We found that limited notion of sharing
a potentially critical file in an indiscriminate status update a bit at odds with WinZip's collective approach
to creating a collaborative workflow and adding security,.
WinZip remains a slick, snappy tool for managing ZIP files, and the cloud support is a welcome addition.
Though WinZip is heading in the right direction when it comes to performance and accessibility, its social-
sharing attempt still remains lackluster and gimmicky. There are plenty of good things to go around in
WinZip, and we were pleased with the new package overall.
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