There’s actually a totally usable zipping program built right it to OS X, so you shouldn’t need anything.
Simply Right-click (Command-Click) on a folder or set of files, and select “Compress files” (it may also say “Archive files”, depending on which version of OS X). This will create a zip file called Archive.zip, that you can rename and—boom—you’re done.
WinZip isn’t built in to windows ;)
And for mac i recommend The Unarchiver it unzips Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats.
someone beat me to it. select the stuff you want to zip and right click. there’s an option for “create archive”.
I didn’t know that for the longest time either, and went through the same rigamarole you did. had someone on a social networking site (a mac group) hip me to that.
Note that with improved unzipping speed in Leopard out of the box, ‘The Unarchiver’ is one that fell off my must-haves list… though it is still pretty good if you run into an odd filetype.
+1 for The Unarchiver. It can handle more formats than the default unzipper, and it also adds some special options. It also integrates very transparently into the OS.