ShrinkIt
Review by Grant Kwai
Copyright (c) 1990 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
In March I reviewed a program called Disk Disintegrator Deluxe 5.0. This time I would like to inform you about another Compacting program available for the Apple // series. It is called 'Shrinkit' and the latest version is 3.02.
Once again this is an American Freeware program and was written by Andy Nicholas. It is a very complete program which has a main menu where you can select from such options as Shrinking a Disk or file/s, Unshrinking a Shrinkit, Binary II, or NuFX file, formatting a disk, erasing a disk, creating a subdirectory plus many more.
Probably an advantage of this program over D.D.Deluxe, is its ability to pack single files (ProDOS files only) and also complete disks (any operating system). When packing a disk, it took around 2-3 minutes for a 0k free ProDOS disk and managed to shrink it to a 149 block file, 53% of its original size.
Another advantage is the ability to add another compressed disk file or single file to an archive. That is, you may have a compressed disk file on a disk then you compress a single file. You can then combine these two files together so that they are now one single file.
If the file is too small, Shrinkit is smart enough to leave it uncompressed because the 'compression' would actually enlarge the file. This happens because Shrinkit must save its algorithms with the file but since there is not enough information to compress satisfactorily, the end result would be less productive. For this reason, it is quite natural to see the occasional file being archived uncompressed.
This program has taken the US by storm as is the Apple // compression standard. Nearly all files on Apple // information providing services are packed with this program. It is a very neat little program which doesn't take very long to master which is probably why it has met with so much success. It also does its job very well.
Like all good Public Domain Programs, it comes with complete documentation on disk stating all the required information anyone would need. The Documentation explains what updates have been made throughout ShrinkIt's history and also of some hidden features which are not shown from the menus.
With the advent of Shrinkit and Disk Disintegrator Deluxe, the Apple // now has two very good compression programs that equal that of what is available on the IBM.
You should be able to find this program on most Apple bulletin boards and also Public Domain Software libraries.
Note: There is a special GS version of Shrinkit which is soon to be available in the US. As far as I know, it is not yet available.

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