ExPress

There are various security measures developers can take in order to protect application code from being reverse engineered an illegally distributed. Compression of executable files is one of them, with specialized applications like ExPress putting the necessary tools at your disposal to easily compress multiple files, either to protect the code or reduce space taken up.

One of the application's advantages is that it does not require an installation, thus not making any changes to system registries. This also means that you can keep it on a removable storage device and use it on the go.

What's more, behind the interface that makes the whole process easy, is a powerful command line utility, namely UPX. Whether or not you prefer this alternative, the process is based on the same set of compression algorithms, the choice being just a matter of comfort and taste.

It's enough to drag target files, or a whole directory containing more files and subfolders over the main window to get them ready for processing. These are automatically enlisted along with details regarding, path, name, as well as size before and after the job is done.

Advanced users have a shot at configuring algorithms used to compress files. Amongst others, you can simply enable all methods by ticking a box, or explore options individually, like LZMA method, force, brute and ultra brute.

You can stay on the safe side and have a backup automatically created in case unexpected issues occur. The compression process can last to a few minutes, depending on the overall size of the task. Unfortunately, files are processed in the same directory, without an option to set a default destination folder, so you need to be careful when triggering the process so you don't lose original files.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that ExPress is a handy utility that can both offer a little extra sense of security for your application's code, and significantly reduce the amount of disk space it takes up. What's more, you can configure compression methods that are applied, while doing this on the go because the application is portable.