Airsoft Softwair, the hardest working elves in Christmas business, are proud to present a brand-new plugin for Hollywood: xad.hwp! This plugin allows Hollywood scripts to conveniently open and browse archives through xadmaster.library. It uses Hollywood 6.0's new file and directory adapter plugin interfaces which allow you to iterate through XAD archives as if they were normal directories. Files within XAD archives can also be accessed as if the XAD archive was a normal directory. It just doesn't get any easier! With xad.hwp it is not necessary to unpack a file stored in a XAD archive to a temporary file before it can be opened. Hollywood 6.0's file adapter plugin interface allows direct streaming from the XAD archive into the respective file handler without any temporary file overhead. This makes it even possible to stream music or video directly from a XAD file!

Airsoft Softwair wouldn't be Airsoft Softwair without some extra goodies, though: The XAD plugin is not only available for Amiga platforms but also for all other platforms supported by Hollywood. This is possible because the original xadmaster.library was open-sourced a few years ago which made it possible to port it to other platforms as well. Thus, on AmigaOS and compatibles, xad.hwp will use xadmaster.library directly whereas on all other systems like Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android xad.hwp contains the open-source version of xadmaster.library in its binary. This makes it possible to unpack lots of archive formats like ZIP, LhA, LZX, CAB, bzip2, TAR, and RAR on Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well!

By the way, the program "The Unarchiver", which is at the time of this writing the 7th most downloaded program from Apple's App Store is also based on xadmaster.library originally developed for the Amiga by Dirk Stöcker. This is a good example of how original Amiga technologies are now very successful on other platforms.

The XAD plugin requires at least Hollywood 6.0 and is provided free of charge for all users of Hollywood. Note that it is recommended that you use at least Hollywood 7.0 because with earlier versions there is no support for archives which contain files with non-ASCII names. The XAD plugin is available in versions for AmigaOS 3, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS (x86), Windows (x86,x64), Mac OS X (ppc, x86, x64), Linux (ppc, arm, x86, x64) and Android. On top of that, the plugin comes with 30 pages of documentation in various formats like PDF, HTML, AmigaGuide, and CHM.

xad.hwp is now available for free download from the official Hollywood portal at http://www.hollywood-mal.com/

This release concludes Airsoft Softwair's release cycle in 2017. We wish all Hollywood users a merry XAD-Mas and a happy new year!

This release was brought to you by Airsoft Softwair - the hardest working men in code business.