How can I decompress the installer ZIP file on my Mac?

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Last Updated: June 01, 2012
Keywords: tiger, bomaarchivehelper

Apple have removed support for Stuffit archives in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). If you upgraded to Tiger, you will still have Stuffit from an earlier release, but new Tiger users will not have Stuffit. Exactly why Apple decided to do this is not known.

As a result Readerware has switched to distributing the installer files as ZIP archives. The ZIP format has always been supported in Mac OS X.

To unzip these files simply double click on the icon in the finder.

On some systems that will start the Apple archive utility on others it will start Stuffit Expander. Either should work.

However some users report that Stuffit Expander is crashing. The way around this is to use the Apple archive utility instead. In the finder, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the file. A popup menu will be displayed. Select Open With->BOMArchiveHelper.

Once the file is decompressed double click on the package file to launch the Apple installer.