Folks, while the full disk compression components of ZIPmagic have always been Unicode, the archiving components have lacked Unicode support for quite some time now. I am wrapping up work in this regard, and preparing to launch a beta of ZIPmagic, version 12.7, with full Unicode support.
I'd appreciate if people would sign up to test. Just PM me at this forum to indicate your interest, I'll follow up here if there's demand with the download URL for the beta when it is available.
In the interest of shipping quickly, and providing a consistent user experience; I have had to remove a lot of non-Unicode plug-ins from the distribution. While the plug-in API does recognize non-Unicode legacy plug-ins, and still supports loading them; these seemed to be a bit of dead weight from the past.
A particularly noteworthy item that got the axe are the open source plug-ins. Since the open sourcing, there has been absolutely negligible public interest in making new plug-ins for ZIPmagic, and there has indeed been much uncalled for negative interpretations of these open source portions. If there are significant complaints from customers, I could update the OSS repo for the latest Unicode plug-in API specifications; but for now, I've also removed them all.
I believe the actual result is a lightning fast, high quality product. Most people probably don't really care for all those other obscure archive formats that got the axe anyways; but again, I'd love to hear within the beta feedback cycle what all your thoughts are on the matter. Thanks for listening!