September 8th, 2006: a small update to RAR Expander which upgrades the unrar core to the latest version (v3.60) has been released as v0.8.5 beta 3. The previous betas of v0.8.5 used beta versions of this latest unrar core. As the unrar core is now considered stable, this is probably the last beta of v0.8.5 and a stable version will be released in the coming days.
August 1st, 2006: an updated beta of RAR Expander 0.8.5 has been released, it features a few small changes to the previous beta.
June 19th, 2006: RAR Expander version 0.8.4 and 0.8.5-beta 1 released. Version v0.8.4 should fix a critical crash that occurred on Intel-based Macs when expanding password-protected or malformed multi-part archives. The new beta version features an improved password entry dialog, supports expanding password-protected archives via AppleScript, was updated to use the latest unrar core and fixes a small bug.
February 17th, 2006: Users who beta tested RAR Expander on their new Intel-based macs have confirmed it is working as expected! Thus a new stable release of RAR Expander is now available which is compiled as a Universal Binary and should therefore run faster on Intel-based macs than the previous version of RAR Expander. Thanks Christoph, Randall and Nick!
February 4th, 2006: Due to time constraints no new news items were posted in the RAR Expander news feed since version 0.7, but probably most of you using the application noticed the release of version 0.8 through RAR Expander's auto version update check. The release of today, v0.8.2, is only a small update for users of PowerPC-based Macs, but for those who already have an Intel-based Mac the also newly released beta is a first chance to test a Universal Binary version of RAR Expander that should run faster than the existing releases of RAR Expander on these macs. One big warning though: this beta is really a beta, or should I say alpha release, as I have not been able to test it on an Intel-based mac. If any users with an Intel-based Mac wish to help me in this, please download and try the beta, but please keep the usual warnings for beta software in mind!!
March 30th, 2005: released a new version of RAR Expander, functionality-wise it is completely the same as the previous 0.6 release, but I wanted to show off the very nice new icon! Credit and many thanks for designing the new icon goes to Amir Alam of "Druckerei Alam"! I would also like to thank Brenn Hill for offering to help as well, and Shane Hollis for his draft designs!
January 9th, 2005: RAR Expander v0.6 released. This version features greatly improved expansion speed, AppleScript support and comes with two example scripts to help you expand several RAR archives at once.
January 8th, 2005: News on new RAR Expander releases and other information will now also be made available through an RSS feed!
December 3d, 2004: Rar Expander v0.5 released. This version has a new internal architecture which improves the responsiveness of the application: previous versions of Rar Expander were unresponsivess while an archive was being expanded, this has now been solved, you can still use the File menu to open archives even while another archive is still being expanded. Expansion of the newly opened archives will start when the current expansion is finished. AppleScript support was also planned for this version, but due to the announcement earlier today, I decided to release this version without the (currently unfinished) AppleScript support. A new version including AppleScript support might still be released later.
December 3d, 2004: I noticed that Allume Systems (formerly Aladdin Systems) has released a new version of their Stuffit Expander product which now (finally!) also handles multi-volume and password-protected RAR archives. I've noticed a few bugs in it still though such as: when a volume is missing because it is renamed the dialog that pops up to ask you to locate that volume sometimes doesn't 'believe' you when you give the actual location and simply pops up again and the support for deleting archives after expansion only deletes the first volume of an archive. Still the missing volume support was the reason I wrote RAR Expander, now that it is finally supported in *the* standard Mac archive expansion program, further development of RAR Expander doesn't seem to make much sense anymore. I will still finish and release the version that was currently under development though :)
November 16th, 2004: Rar Expander v0.4 released. This version adds support for password protected archives. (Note: this support is not entirely the way it should be, the password dialog does not appear in a 'sliding sheet' but rath er in a seperate window. Archives with different passwords for different files will still fail. I unfortunately didn't have time to handle these issues as well, but they are not critical and since I do not know when I will have time to work on Rar Expander again I decided to release it 'as-is')
August 5, 2004: Rar Expander v0.3 released. This version adds an automatic version update checker and fixes a bug in the handling of the progress bar for archives containing very large files.
December 1st, 2003: Rar Expander v0.2 released. This new version adds a preferences window where you can configure where you want Rar Expander to expand archives to, and whether or not it should create "surrounding folders" for the contents of an archive.