Keygener Assistant

Computer science goes back for some time and in the beginning there was the command line, which gave you the possibility to interact with a machine through different codes. Although the trend of programming is rapidly transforming into less and less knowledge for code writing, it's not obsolete and specialized applications such as Keygener Assistant still provide a great deal of help when working with characters and encodings of different types.

As soon as the download is finished you can go ahead and take the application for a spin to see what it's all about. This means it's portable and doesn't take you through a setup process, letting you keep it on a USB Flash drive to use on the go, while the target PC's health status remains intact.

You might want to take it easy when first going through its set of features. Neatly organized, you find different tabs that hold various tools for calculating, converting and analyzing an abundance of character types and encodings, both for manual input of text strings or existing files.

It's a good idea to keep a text editor at hand for copying results, with the application even putting a few links to default system utilities at your disposal such as Notepad, Calculator, command prompt, Dxdiag and on-screen keyboard.

Although a little rough in presenting its features and working with them, flexibility is one of its strong points. Different input fields let you write what you want to convert or calculate, with results instantly being displayed in the other fields. Various character base sets, string encodings such as PGP Decode, different MIME, XXCODE, UUCODE, RFC1760 configurations, as well as ASCII Hex or decimal are easily selected through drop-down menus.

Besides conversion, the application also gives you the possibility to scan libraries or executables in order to find out what compiler was used, whether or not the code is encrypted or view the code under different character encodings.

It's also possible to hide the code yourself with a dedicated tool. An impressive array of algorithms are at your disposal, such as Blowfish, GOST, IDEA, Sapphire or Shark, with customizable characteristics for block cipher, key hash and mode.

To sum it up, Keygener Assistant is a small but incredibly powerful application that takes your character input and processes it in the way that best fits your needs or project requirements. It's one of the tools from which programmers of all levels of experience can benefit a lot, with an abundance of conversion, encryption and analysis tools packed in a well-organized visual layer.