msoftware.co.nz is dead!?

[encode]

Looks like the site of the M Software has been passed to the past...

[Matt Mahoney]

Yeah, too bad WinRK died. It had great compression, but a buggy GUI that I am sure consumed all of Malcolm Taylor's time. He couldn't possibly have sold enough copies to make it worthwhile, not with so much free and open source competition. He essentially rewrote paq6 in version 3.02 and paq8 in 3.03 (even using paq7asm with my permission), but couldn't really improve it. It had to be tough considering about 20 people made contributions to paq, not counting all the benchmarking, forks like paq8hp12, lpaq, xml-wrt, and wrapper projects like powerpaq, peazip, etc. It shows the power of open source. With closed source you have to do all the work yourself.

But WinRK still has some of the best compression for.exe, .wav and until recently .bmp.

[Mike]

http://www.msoftware.co.nz works fine here.

And no announcement that Malcom stops development

[encode]

Indeed!

[Matt Mahoney]

But no update to WinRK since Mar. 2006. Last time I tried to run the 30 day free trial (a year ago) it said it was expired as soon as I installed it.

Malcolm says here that he has not abandoned it, but that was 6 months ago with no word since. Look at all the bug reports. It would be a great as a command line program but the GUI was awful. He had to be losing money on every customer.

[Mike]

I'm a huge fan of Duke Nukem and i'm awaiting Duke Nukem For(n)ever. So i'm not worried about WinRK's development

More seriously i agree with you : a command line would be better (and by far)

[Black_Fox1]

Is there any information about the compression project xcluster is developing?

And did you know that Bill Petis closed the PAQ section of his website?

[Black_Fox1]

Im a huge fan of Duke Nukem and im awaiting Duke Nukem For(n)ever. So im not worried about WinRKs development

But you should be! After many years another teaser for DNF was released! The reason Im ressurecting this thread:

It has been a while since the last time I updated the front page. But I am now excited and happy to report to you that M Software is moving again after its short hiatus. The company is looking at an exciting new direction, entailing an interesting change in focus.
Our ultimate goal is now to provide you with better and more unique product choices, whilst also becoming more profitable in the process!

More details will be released in January, so check back soon!