WinZip (for iPhone)

One of the problems with iPads and iPhones is that they don't have any folder destinations for downloading files. The exception is when doing so from within an app that specifically supports the format of the file in question. Though iPads and iPhones include several useful viewer capabilities, such as for PDFs, DOCs, and images, they lack support for one common file format used for attachments: .ZIP

Within the Windows and Mac environments, this isn't a problem: this format is available as a choice right in Windows Explorer and in Mac OS X's Finder as the Compress choice. Zipping compresses the package's contents so they take up less storage space, and you can optionally encrypt the resulting archive file with a password. The problem? When you try to download a ZIP file attached to an email in iOS, you get a message saying "Mail cannot open this attachment."

To the rescue comes the free WinZip for iPad and iPhone (two apps, so you're not looking at a lot of wasted space with an iPhone app on your iPad), bearing the name of the tried-and-true zipping and unzipping utility. After installing the app, users who receive an email with a ZIP attachment can choose "Open in WinZip." The app not only lets you see what files are zipped inside the archive file, but lets you view the contained documents if they're one of 11 very popular formats:

• Word documents (.doc, .docx)
• Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx)
• PowerPoint presentations (.ppt, .pptx)
• PDF files (.pdf)
• Photos and images (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .gif, .tif, .tiff)
• Text files (.txt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Keynote (.key)
• Numbers (.numbers)
• Web files (.htm, .html, .jsp)
• Pages (.pages)

Of course, if you already have apps that handle these files types, you can view and in some cases edit them, but not if they arrived in ZIP format. The WinZip app's interface resembles the native Mail app in that it sports a list along the left, with item contents shown in the largest area on the right. Tapping the Show button opens the selected file for full screen viewing.

I tested the app with photos, DOC files, Excel sheets, and PDFs, and was able to view all successfully. And I could unpinch to zoom both images and documents such as Excel sheets. For the latter, the viewer even let me select and view multiple table tabs.

But the very basic WinZip app doesn't also go the other way. That is, it doesn't let you create ZIP files for email attachments, compression, or encryption. Nor does it let you actually unzip, for example, photos, for viewing in other apps. I'd also like to see a history option where I could view previously downloaded and unzipped archives. As it is now, you can only view the latest download. We can only hope that these features are coming in a future update. But for now, this free iOS utility goes part of the way towards bolstering the iPhone and iPad's lack of a true accessible file system.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/5RESGbIkOe8/0,2817,2400784,00.asp

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