NXPowerLite Desktop 10: Conversation with Mike Power

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      Mike Power owns and runs Neuxpower, the company behind the popular compression software NXPowerLite, WeCompress, and now Slidewise, a PowerPoint fonts and media add-in. He has been running Neuxpower for more than 20 years, which makes him feel a tiny bit old. Although he generally has a company to run, he loves nothing more than getting stuck into designing software. He’s particularly fussy (some might say meticulous) about ensuring that Neuxpower retains a focus on simple, unfussy software that just gets the job done.

In this conversation, Mike talks about the tenth release of NXPowerLite, their file compression program.

Geetesh: Mike, the tenth version of NXPowerLite doesn’t just look like a numerical landmark, but it’s got so many new features that seem unparalleled. Tell us more about this new release and what motivated you to add so much more.

Mike: Reaching version 10 feels like a pretty big deal, so we wanted to mark the occasion by setting ourselves some more ambitious goals. We didn’t want it to be a release that just slightly improved the compression and tweaked the UI.

It gets increasingly challenging to make changes to software when it gets to this kind of age (v1 launched 20th November 2001), without creating an outcry – imagine the arrival of the Ribbon into Office. You’re not only fighting technical decisions you made 10 years earlier (“Of course we’ll never need it to do that”), but also the collective weight of all the existing users’ expectations. People often don’t like it if you change how things work too much, so we wanted to be ambitious, but we also knew we needed to be careful not to change how NXPowerLite worked too dramatically.

We’ve suspected for a long time that the biggest problem with NXPowerLite comes on those rare occasions when it cannot compress a file enough. When that happened, we knew our software would go from being a super-helpful tool, to a frustrating waste of someone’s time. This realization drove us a bit crazy and following a user survey it appeared to drive many users crazy too.

Tackling this big problem invigorated us, and it made us excited about how much better NXPowerLite could be if we just pushed hard enough. Which in turn gave us more confidence to tackle other areas of the product that suddenly felt like they weren’t keeping up.

Desktop 10 isn’t perfect – no software is – but for anyone who’s used earlier versions this one should feel tangibly different…smoother, more polished, and just plain better. And that’s before you get to the main problem we set out to solve: always getting you to a smaller file, whatever the file contents.

Geetesh: One of the most amazing options is the built-in 7-zip feature that lets you peek inside Microsoft Office files. Can you tell us more.

Mike: This is actually one of the core changes that support our efforts to make sure you can always reduce your files. If a file doesn’t compress enough, it’s usually because there is some content in the file that NXPowerLite is not yet able to compress. The first step always begins with understanding what content is keeping your file from reducing.

We regularly use 7-zip internally to answer this question when customers send us files to investigate, so it seemed a logical step to integrate it with NXPowerLite, so they could do it for themselves. The media inside Office files are organized into helpful subfolders, and using 7-zip you can instantly see which of those folders are large. This tells you what type of content you need to deal with. In the example below it is embeddings or embedded objects.

In some cases, just optimizing the file using NXPowerLite and the new Strong profile may get you the reduction you need.

However, in case it doesn’t we’ve also created file-specific guides that walk you through how to compress whatever the large content is manually. These guides can be reached by following the What if my file didn’t reduce? links.

Using these two together to identify the large content inside a file, and the guides on how to compress it manually, should prevent anyone from ever getting stuck with a large file and no idea how to reduce it.

How can one try out these NXPowerLite features? Is a trial version available?

NXPowerLite Desktop always comes with a 14-day free trial, which can be downloaded from our website. We reset the trial with each major version, so even if someone has tried NXPowerLite before they can get another 14 days with v10 to check out the new features.

We also have a business evaluation for teams available, giving unrestricted access for 30 days – contact us for more details.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.