StuffIt network check prevents launch
StuffIt network check prevents launch
Over the weekend we received a good number of reports of an issue where StuffIt, StuffIt Expander, and the StuffIt "Drop" utilities (DropStuff and DropZip) appear to "stall" at launch -- their icons bounce in the Dock for up to several minutes before the applications finish launching. Reader Daniel Maze discovered the cause of this problem: The StuffIt utilities check for new updates at launch -- over the Internet, assuming a network connection is available -- and if the Aladdin servers are unavailable, the update check will cause launch to stall until the check times out. It turns out that over the weekend, the Aladdin update server was apparently down or offline, thus resulting in these stalls. (As several readers have pointed out, Aladdin was purchased by Allume last year, and as of the past few days, the Aladdin.com domain is no longer responding. We expect Allume to fix this problem either by redirecting the Alladin.com domain to Allume's own servers or by releasing an update to StuffIt; the former would be preferable.)
It appears this problem is not limited to version 9 (the latest version) of these utilities; since our initial coverage this morning we've received reports from users of versions as far back as 8.0. You can avoid this issue in the future by disabling the "Allow Version Checking" option in each application's preferences; however, this means that you'll have to check for updates manually via the Allume website or by using our sister site, VersionTracker.
Alternatively, you can disable this feature without opening the application -- useful if the servers ever go down again -- via Terminal by using the defaults command. For example, to disable version checking for StuffIt Expander, you should make sure Expander isn't running and then open Terminal and type:
- defaults write com.stuffit.Expander allowVersionChecking -bool NO [RETURN]
UPDATE Readers have since provided the following commands for the other StuffIt apps (again, make sure the application in question isn't running when you use the command, or it won't work):
- StuffIt Deluxe: defaults write com.stuffit.Deluxe allowVersionChecking -bool NO [RETURN]
DropStuff: defaults write com.stuffit.DropStuff allowVersionChecking -bool NO [RETURN]
DropTar: defaults write com.stuffit.DropTar allowVersionChecking -bool NO [RETURN]
DropZip: defaults write com.stuffit.DropZip allowVersionChecking -bool NO [RETURN]
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