Compression utility

I’m the kind of person who learns by experience. Don’t tell me how to do something, show me how to do it. Show me an example. I find it much easier to understand things this way.

Bringing this to the context of the web and computers, everytime I’m looking for a software or a script, the first thing I look for is a screenshot or an online demo, respectively. Only after I’ve seen this is that I go read the features list, just to make sure specific features are available, in case I haven’t recognized them in the screenshot, for example. Of course, in this case, a visual aid or a demo experiece will also tell me a lot about the overall quality of the program or script. Unless something is well referred to me, I hardly ever download something I can’t see at least a screenshot of.

But anyway, I was just rambling. Actually I started this post for a different reason. Right now I’m looking for a good compression/extraction utility, link Winzip. To my surprise, I was completely unaware of the fact that Winzip is shareware. I’ve used it since God knows when, but it always came with the computer, I never actually downloaded it. Still, I seem to have been under the impression that it was free software. Well, it’s not. So I need something else. I then came across many other options, among which 2 seem to be the best ones around: FlipZip and ZipGenius. They are both well rated at many download sites and now I can’t decide on which to use.

Which compression/extraction utility do you use? Have you ever used any of these two? Please, give me some opinions!