ZipGenius has greatly evolved over the years, and today it isn't just a zip/unzip application, but a perfect companion for your work. ZipGenius is not only a great solution for those who need to archive and protect their files and projects, but also suitable for everyone who just wants to share pictures and music files.

Version 6 of ZipGenius take advantage of the experience acquired since ZipGenius 5 first public release: we got bug reports, compliments, critics, suggestions and feature requests, and everything has contributed to build a better ZipGenius day after day. ZipGenius now is more flexible than before, it has been improved and it is faster, but it still is easy to use.

ZipGenius is presented in two editions: STANDARD and SUITE that differs for the content they ship to user's Desktop. While the suite edition is the full setup package that includes all the optional modules of the ZipGenius project, because it is a setup layout oriented to experts and power users, the standard setup package just includes the main ZipGenius application because it is designed for most Windows® users, that just want to open/compress/decompress archives in several formats.
Discover how many awards ZipGenius got: click here.

ZipGenius handles more than 20 file types:

ZipGenius features are unusual for a program of this type:  you could get support for TWAIN devices (scanners and digital cameras), file extraction to CD/DVD burner (only under Windows XP^®), an FTP client (FTPGenius), and other stuff.

ZipGenius frees your passions:  if you like music or digital photography, if you are a webmaster or just a web amateur, if you work or study, ZipGenius is always ready to assist you with its tools. Among them ZGAlbum has an important role:  it allows you to create slideshows with your favorite pictures, which can be loaded from a folder or imported through a TWAIN device.

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Power.
Today ZipGenius is a mature application that uses system resources in a smart way; that's why in ZipGenius you get a whole new user interface and functions have been placed in multiple locations. Moreover, ZipGenius will allow you to use your mouse right button in a very clever way: all the most important functions have been replicated there.
ZipGenius also fully integrates with Windows^® Explorer shell and, specifically, it takes advantage of using Windows^® XP innovative features, such as built-in support to CD-R writers.
ZipGenius 6 is a typical application for Windows^® environment, but today Linux is closer than ever: RPM, TAR, TAR.GZ, TGZ, GZ, Z files are well supported and you are now enabled to move files from Linux to Windows^® and vice versa.

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Safety.
In ZipGenius we focused on increasing data security, so we introduced these features to achieve that result:  the archive history file is encrypted, the most recently used files list can be enabled (always or per session) or disabled, and CryptoZip 2.1 gives better encryption algorhythms to lock your archives. In fact, now you can even create self-locking/self-erasing archives and you can choose to encrypt files with one of four algorhythms (CZIP, Blowfish, Twofish, Rijndael AES). Plus, CZIP files no longer depend on ZipGenius because you can create even executable CZIP (.EXE) files which will allow you to send your encrypted archives to people who (still) don't use ZipGenius.
In ZipGenius 6 you also get additional protection for your system and data integrity against viruses spread through the Internet. Many virus writers use to spread their malicious code as password-protected ZIP archives, because they know that EVERY antivirus software is not able to scan inside ZIP files that are protected with password. You can recognize these malicious ZIP files whenever you get an e-mail saying "open the attached ZIP files, the password is ....": they are driving you to infect your PC by yourself. ZipGenius recognizes all files that may be considered a threat for your data, and if you try to preview a suspected file, the program warns you about the risk you may run into; moreover, if you set an antivirus software path in ZipGenius options, the program will prompt you to perform an AV scan before running the selected file.

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Innovation.
ZipGenius has always been mindful of innovations and it follows the major changes in the IT world, so every new release has a list of specific features that allow ZipGenius to interact with the most loved programs in the world.
During the last years, many people have seen how some competitor tried to improve ZIP compression algorhythm by adding new data deflation techniques, but this effort resulted in a method that produces non-standard ZIP files: this means that the ZIP archives compressed using that new technique are not compatible with most ZIP utilities (ZipGenius included). So what to do? It's easy: use ZipGenius 6! ZipGenius 6 is now able to handle the open source UPX executable compressor, which is used to compress ZipGenius main executable. If UPX.exe is in ZipGenius program folder, you will get an extra compression level while creating new ZIP archives: Brutal+UPX. Many executable files (EXE, DLL, OCX) are distributed as they are after code compilation, so they may have a larger size than what they really need to have. Don't you believe this? Download this PDF file and see how ZipGenius Brutal+UPX compression level can compress more than other utilities out-of-standard enhanced deflation technique.
Other great features are:

• Support for 7-zip compression format
  The 7-zip compression format, conceived by Igor Pavlov (http://www.7-zip.org), can surely be considered as the best successor to ZIP format, which is getting older day by day. 7-zip is really powerful and it is suggested when you have to compress multimedia files, such as videos and MP3s.

• Support for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice documents
  OpenOffice.org is a well-known suite of office applications and a great product of the open source community. These programs produce their own files in a special format:  they are .ZIP archives with a custom file extension containing some XML files, which OpenOffice.org programs merge together to rebuild the original documents. ZipGenius takes care of this feature and allows you to manage those files as if they were common zip files, plus you can optimize them:  in fact, OpenOffice.org doesn't use the maximum compression level available for .ZIP format, but ZipGenius does. When you optimize an OpenOffice.org document with ZipGenius, you will gain from 5 to 10 KB of size reduction (depending by the content of the OO.org file) because ZipGenius will recompress the document with the "Brutal" compression level.

• Multilianguage system
  ZipGenius now is really ready for everybody:  it can be used in other languages besides English and Italian.

These and other features make ZipGenius the richest freeware application around, and one of the most awarded application for Windows.