This doc may sound slightly grumpy in places, still this is how we feel about things, so there ;-) Intended use ------------ The Imploder is intended for creating extra space on your system disk while maintaining full functionality. To achieve this goal, we've tried to make the decompression process as invisible and fast as possible. Thus the Imploder doesn't support any annoying colour flashing, and it has a high speed of decompression. On a vanilla 68000 Amiga, "explosion" speed is about 30-50 K/s, depending on the type of compressed code. Also, the explode.library is a bit faster than the explosion routines appended to stand-alone "imploded" files. You should take this speed issue into consideration when determining which executables to implode. For floppy users, the startup times will mostly be FASTER. Users with fast harddrives however might want to limit themselves to imploding only infrequently used executables. It is therefore very useful to floppy users, yet harddrive users can also add a few megs to their bit budget. Evidently, the optimum use of the Imploder will vary from system to system. A3000 owners for example won't even be able notice programs exploding. Because of this, over the years, the emphasis of the Imploder's intended use has moved away from Imploding being a once in a program's life time operation, suitable e.g. when an author wants to distribute his program. Instead we now feel that every user should be able - when installing a program - to decide whether or not to implode it, and in what way. The user's responsibility ------------------------- So the issue here is freedom of choice. And it is responsibility of the user to apply the Imploder in a sensible fashion. To get a feel for what I'm talking about simply look at what happened when people started distributing Power-Packed text files. Many people didn't like using the PPMore reader or simply didn't have it. This kind of thing can be utterly annoying, and the Imploder has the potential for the same kind of abuse. We therefore recommend limiting the use of the Imploder to compressing things installed in your system. So if you must pass on a program to someone else, use the original archive. This keeps everyone happy, including the program's author. Another point is that when receiving programs from PD sources, people should be able to easily check if programs contain file viri or other unwanted things. If an executable is imploded it'll have to be deploded before one is able to examine the code. So don't distribute compressed executables of _any_ type. Still, there was one action we could take to encourage the kind of use we recommend; In previous versions one could select a "protect" option that prevented a program from being deplodable. The intent of this option was to protect an author's work before he distributed it. In reality people started using it to protect dirty hacks or programs containing file viri. Evidently this is incompatible with our philosophy. Thus, the support for protecting programs has been discontinued as of version 4.0. In addition to this, the Imploder now allows decompression of any protected files left over from the past.