By Hays Goodman Reviews Editor You can never have enough compression utilities. In the last couple of years, the technology seems to be making some significant jumps, big enough that if your last exposure to making files smaller was, say, WinZip, you might want to re-examine your compression techniques. Piranha Inc. brings Piranha Byte to the software table, as a way to compress just about any file. The product is targeted at the print and publishing industries, with strengths in the area of image compression. However, the application does not target the file's extension as the ultimate determiner of compression.
Compression is performed deeper, at the actual code rather than the code as a predefined block.
However, the compression is particularly efficient when dealing with image files, as the test results seem to confirm. Piranha Byte installs as a desktop application, and installed on my Windows NT workstation without a hitch. PB is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Sun Solaris. The pane to the right shows the files that you have either selected for compression to be included in the archive, or the files that have already been compressed as well as data about them, such as file sizes before and after compression, and the time required to perform the compression. The bottom two panes relate to the transfer of files.