base64

The computer doesn’t understand text and characters the way we do, but rather by specific code associated to each. There are multiple types of text encoding, such as base64. In this regard, base64 is an application which aims to encode and decode text to be converted into the homonymous encoding and back.

One of the application’s main advantages is that it skips you the effort of going through a setup process. On the one hand, it’s good to go from the moment it reaches your computer. On the other hand, it can be easily carried around on a thumb drive so you can have this encoding method available even on other computers, without having registry entries affected.

The visual design is a classic window frame, which is pretty compact, but manages to hold all required functions. It can also expand to display text content if you plan on grabbing text from an existing file.

Drag and drop is not supported as an import method, so you need to use the browse dialog. The application can read content from different text documents, but it’s advisable to only use TXT files, because rich text isn’t properly read, and might lead to corrupt content when attempting to decode and save to file again.

Both encoding and decoding are possible in three different ways. There’s the possibility to process text you write down, clipboard content, or whatever is inside a TXT file. As an additional option, you can enable line breaks. Note that saving to file also implies to write down the desired format.

To sum it up, base64 manages to live up to expectations, being a straightforward, yet reliable method of processing text to convert it to and from base64. The visual design poses no accommodation problems, and portability provides a bit more flexibility than conventional programs.