Text Compressor

Since communication is an important part of your life and it’s not done in a great deal over the web, you might want to to keep some messages only to yourself. Luckily, computer applications can help out in this regard. For instance, Text Compressor is quite a simple tool which makes text unreadable through encryption.

The application offers several advantages, and the first one you come across is portability. With no setup involved, you can run it right after download, and even store it on a USB flash drive so nobody finds it to decrypt your messages. Just make sure that .NET Framework is installed on the computer you plan to use it on.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the application resembles a command line interface, but isn’t built to be a command prompt program. There are a couple of text fields, one of which is where input goes, while the other shows the encrypted form of your text. Controls are right in the middle, and process your text in a jiffy.

Sadly, there are no import options, not even for plain text, so not even dropping a TXT file over the window has an effect. This means that you either need to write down the message on the spot, or import from clipboard. The same goes for the processed text, so you might want to keep a blank document at hand.

As soon as input is done, hitting the “compress” button processes your text and delivers the encrypted form. You can swap text to see whether the reverse process is successful. Be careful not to encrypt multiple times, or you might end up not knowing how many times you need to decrypt the message.

Bottom line is that Text Compressor delivers a pretty straightforward set of options to keep text messages safe. Sure enough, the whole operation is fast, and efficient, but it would have been useful to see at least simple methods of loading text documents, and exporting directly to file.