You buy Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you install it into your Mac and everything's fine in your world. However, in previous incarnations of Mac OS 9 and OS X, Allume Systems' Stuffit Expander shipped as part of the Mac OS X bundle. Its absence in Mac OS X Tiger, only becomes painfully obvious when you come across an archived or zipped file that needs to be expanded.

Although, Mac OS X Tiger retains the built-in ability to compress files (see our earlier article: Mac OS X Panther | Zipping/Compressing Files), Stuffit is still a basic system requirement to expand compressed files. If you're new to Mac having just switched from PC's, think 'WinZip'. Stuffit Expander can be said to be its Mac counterpart.

This issue does not affect users who upgrade to Mac OS X Tiger from previous versions of Mac OS X since Stuffit Expander is already resident in your previous version of Mac OS X.

For the rest of us, you can download your free copy of Allume Systems Stuffit Expander here. Its hardly surprising that Stuffit Expander is topping Apple Download page's Top Downloads list, at press time.