How Can I Get Support for RAR Expander or Report a Bug?

To report new bugs or request support for RAR Expander, please use the SourceForge Bug Reports and Support Requests tracking systems. These are standard SourceForge pages that unfortunately may look a little confusing, but reporting bugs and support requests using this system makes it the easiest for me to keep track of all the requests: just click "Submit New" on those pages to add new reports and requests. If you are not a SourceForge member, please do not forget to leave your email address in the "Description" field, otherwise I will not be able to contact you!

Why Should I Make a Donation and How Much Should I Donate?

I originally made RAR Expander simply because I needed a good RAR expansion application myself, but since then I have spent a lot of time on providing preferences, help files, GUI design, proper error handling, making it faster etc. to make it useful to others as well. And then there is the additional work that comes with making it available to others: answering support requests and handling bug reports. While I'm not expecting to get rich from RAR Expander, I was hoping the donations would pay for the occassional pizza and coke for RAR Expander programming sessions. :) Alas, so far only a few people (less than 5!) have made a donation, so I'm hoping that in the future more users of RAR Expander will recognize this plea: if you like RAR Expander and have some use for it, please consider making a donation!

How much you should donate is really up to you to decide! I find it hard to put a price on software. Most commercial software is priced like a tool: like a screwdriver, Apple's iWork costs $79 no matter how much you use it. But for users, a program is often more like a service than a tool: if you only occassionally need RAR Expander's help to access the contents of an archive, it's value to you may be not much more than $5; if you need to often expand RAR archives, RAR Expander may be worth more to you. One user for example posted a feature request related to batch processing of multiple RAR archives at once which he found missing in other RAR expansions programs on the mac, I told him to take a look at the example scripts provided with RAR Expander which already do more or less what he asked for, and he immediately made a donation of $20! (Thanks a lot Anders!) This is why RAR Expander is donationware: you can decide what is a fair amount to donate depending on how much you use the application etc. But please do consider making a donation!

Can I Tell RAR Expander to Delete RAR Archives After It Has Expanded Them?

Yes and no: there is no preference setting in RAR Expander that will make it automatically (or after asking you) delete RAR archives after expanding them. But the RAR Expander download includes an example AppleScript which you can use to do this: the script expands all archives in a folder, and then moves the archives that were expanded without errors to the trash. Download RAR Expander, and you will find the script in the "Example Scripts" folder included with RAR Expander, the script is called "Replace RAR Archives with Expansion".

Will Functionality for Creating RAR Archives be Added to RAR Expander?

It is at this point unlikely that I will change RAR Expander to something like "RAR Compressor". Unfortunately, it's not interesting for me to add compression functionality to RAR Expander because I would have to make RAR Expander (or "RAR Compresser" then) shareware. The reason is that only the library for uncompressing RAR archives is available for free and can be included and used by any programmer for free in his program, but this is not so for the library for compressing RAR archives. If I want to use that library, I have to pay RAR's developer a license fee for the library, and I would somehow have to get this money from RAR Expander by making it shareware. As I'm not a commercial developer and have no intent to be one, this is not an option for me. An alternative to using the RAR compression library would be to rely on the "rar" command-line utility. There is at least one OSX application that does this: RARMe. But this approach makes it more difficult to do proper error-handling etc. Thus, unless enough users make donations for me to pay for the RAR library compression technology, it is unlikely that this functionality will be added to RAR Expander.

Can RAR Expander Recover Broken Archives Using Recovery Records or Volumes?

RAR Expander does not currently support such a feature, as the free rar library it is built on does not support recovery records in RAR archives nor recovery volumes (".rev" files). Adding such a feature to RAR Expander would require use of the licensed rar library. See the answer to the above question for more information on issues related to the differences between the free and licensed rar libraries.

Does RAR Expander Run on Intel-based Macintoshes?

Yes, the latest versions of RAR Expander are released in Universal Binary form for full compatibility with Intel-based Macs.