I'll cover the basic operations here; similar information can be found in the help file. If you missed the download link for the program, it's available from the Download page.
Rip-Zip is a file zipping and un-zipping utility. I wrote it for my own personal use, I deal with a lot of zip files it seems. It was sometimes cumbersome to open 30 or 40 separate zip files and extract the contents individually, so I wrote the program such that it will operate on several files in succession without having to manually open each one. Then I thought it might be nice to have the program do the opposite operation - create several separate zip files from a list of files. I'll cover those two operations, and point out a couple of the features in the process. Here's a screenshot of the Rip-Zip main window, using one of the included "skins" (not a skin in the true sense, but you can change the background image on the main form). There are only two examples in these lessons: Unzipping and Zipping.
Rip-Zip has drag & Drop capabilities; you can drag files from the Window's Explorer pane and drop them on the Rip-Zip main window. It checks the file types of all the files when they're dropped. If all the dropped files are *.zip files, it opens the Unzip dialog. If one or more of the files is anything other than *.zip, it assumes you want to zip all the files you dropped and opens the Zip dialog. This is by far the handiest way to use Rip-Zip, although you can use the dialogs to navigate to the locations to choose the files. I also added Rip-Zip to my Send-To menu (this is not done during program installation, you must figure that out on your own. I despise programs that assume you want them added to the Send-To menu).
The first lesson will be unzipping a collection of 5 files. I'm going to use 5 of my image collections: sTile001.zip, sTile002.zip, sTile003.zip, sTile004.zip, and sTile005.zip. Here you can see that I've hi-lited those files, and the rip-zip window is visible so that I can drop them.
When the files are dropped onto the rip-zip window, it opens the Unzip dialog with the files hi-lited in the navigation pane:
I've numbered a few of the fields to help find them when I describe them. 1 - I've indicated that I want the unzipped files to go to a new folder. You can use the open folder button to select a new folder, or just type it in manually. If the folder doesn't exist, it will be created for you. 2 - If you get zip files that are password protected, it sometimes is tedious to keep track of all the different ones and to associate them with specific files. You can type in the password for the files if you know it, or add it to the list of passwords to try in the event the zip files are password protected. The passwords are remembered the next time you start the program (all settings are saved). 3 - Show File Hints will cause a hint window to display some file info when the mouse hovers over the file name. 4 - And finally, you can choose to have Windows Explorer launch into the specified folder when all files have been unzipped.
When you've set the options as you want, click the UnZip Now button. The progress of each file and the overall progress is displayed during the operation. With the options set as in the example above, Windows Explorer opens when all five zip files have been unzipped:
You can now close the Unzip dialog in Rip-Zip. That's it for the Unzip tutorial, it's pretty straight-forward.
Now we'll create some zip files, using some of the same files we just unzipped from the Unzipping tutorial. This time, we'll put each jpg image in it's own zip file, and add a copyright notice to each of the zip files. We'll also password protect the newly created zip files.
This time we'll use the Zip dialog to navigate to the folder and select the files we want to zip. On the main window of Rip-Zip, click the large button on the far left side to open the Zip dialog:
You can see that I'm in the RipZip folder, and I've selected files 1 - 10 and 15 - 20.
I've chosen to create a separate zip file for each file, which means there will be a total of 16 files when the operation is complete. I've also indicated that another file should be added to each zip file that gets created.
I used the open folder button to navigate and select the file to include. You can specify as many additional files as you want, and they can all be from different folder locations.
The zip files that get created will be stored in a new folder called C:\RipZipOut
The zip files will be named HWImage001.zip thru HWImage016.zip.
All 16 zip files will be password protected, with a password of harmware.net
I left the Recurse Directories and Relative Paths options checked, but there are no sub-directories so these are ignored.
When all options have been set, click on the ZIP Now button to begin the operation. When all the files have been created, the Zip dialog window switches to the folder where the zip files were stored. You should now have 16 separate zip files, all password protected:
That's it for the tutorials, it's fairly straight-forward. The help file goes into more detail about all the options and what they do.