RAR Expander 0.8.5 Beta 3

RAR Expander is another frontend which uncompresses the RAR archives on Mac OS X.

RAR Expander is based on the official 'unrar' library which is provided by its developer as a command line application which makes it rather unusable. These kind of programs fill in the gap between the existence of the RAR format and the lack of GUI (graphical user interface) application from the RAR producer.

The application provides you an easy to use interface. You need to provide an input archive by using the dedicated item from the File menu which triggers the whole process.

The uncompressing action depends on your CPU power and disk speed. Anyway, RAR Expander did its job very well. I provided a large archive with many items within and everything went fine.

It supports as input both single-volume or multi-volume RAR archives. The application is also compatible with the password protected archives.

The functionality of RAR Expander can be extended with the built in AppleScript support. The producer provides you some example scripts in order to try this functionality.

The 'Preferences' panel is simple and efficient. You can set up a destination path by using the source's path, a fixed location, or you can let the application to ask you every time you uncompress an archive. You can also use the 'Create Surrounding Folder in Destination' settings which is very useful especially when the archive contains many files, but it doesn't have its own root directory.

Pluses: simple and efficient interface, AppleScript support, multi-volume and password protected archives support.

Drawbacks / flaws: it doesn't have a drop zone which can trigger the uncompressing process.

In conclusion: this is a very good front end for RAR uncompressing and a little bit more usable than UnRarX which does the same job but in a little bit different mode.