Thanks for the first 12 exciting years

Written By Mike Power

We sincerely hope the next 12 years bring as much fun, challenge and excitement as the first.  It’s been a blast – thank you all for your incredible support.

With the launch of NXPowerLite Desktop 6 we thought it might be fun to take a few moments to reflect back on the early years, the first six major releases and 47 minor releases that have gone into making NXPowerLite the software it is today.

You may recognise some of these screenshots (they certainly take us back).  We think that the software is getting smarter, leaner and cleaner all the time, though version 1 still has a certain classic charm to it.

Version 1

20th November 2001

“It was groundbreaking and exciting at the time we built this first version, and looking back it still appeals to my sense of simplicity.”

  • PowerPoint only support

  • Single file at a time

  • Used the PowerPoint API to optimize the files, so relied on having PowerPoint installed

  • Included 9 minor releases

  • Available in 3 languages

NXPowerLite version 1

Version 2

1st November 2005

“We realized during version 2 that email integration was critical. Almost everybody who found us was wrestling with the same problem: trying to email a file that was too big. For businesses the benefits of automating the reduction of attachments was clear.”

  • Worked directly on PowerPoint files without the need for PowerPoint to be installed

  • Added Outlook integration to compress email attachments automatically

  • Added batch optimization

  • Included 10 minor releases

  • Available in 5 languages

NXPowerLite version 2

Version 3

20th February 2007

“By version 3 we had lots of requests to support other formats, so we moved quickly to add Excel and Word. Shortly afterwards Microsoft released Office 2007 featuring the new XML file formats, so we had to do all 3 formats again!”

  • Added support for Excel and Word binary files

  • Added support for PowerPoint, Word and Excel XML formats

  • Added bulk deployment options for remote installation and registering

  • Added Lotus Notes email integration

  • Included 10 minor releases

  • Available in 8 languages

NXPowerLite version 3

Version 4

31st March 2009

“Our focus was to create the simplest and most effective solution for reducing mainstream business documents for email.”

  • Added support for JPEG images

  • Included ability to optimize files within a zip archive

  • Improved integration within Outlook

  • Added Outlook Express and Windows Mail support

  • Included 8 minor releases

  • Available in 13 languages

NXPowerLite version 4

Version 5

27th January 2011

“Customers had been asking us for some time to include PDF support. It came top of our customer survey with around 95% of respondents requesting it. In the words of one customer, ‘If it was able to reduce PDF files then I would have all I need in one application.’”

  • Added the much requested feature to compress PDF files

  • Included 10 minor releases

  • Available in 14 languages

NXPowerLite version 5

Version 6

12th November 2013

“Our key intent this time was to improve the PDF compression, make it easier to use, and more effective as complete email reduction solution."

  • Added Office 2013 support

  • Substantially improved PDF optimization

  • Added automatic zip compression in Outlook

  • Completely redesigned and streamlined the user interface

  • The culmination of 12 years of development

  • Available in 14 languages

NXPowerLite version 6

Looking ahead

Having spent many years listening to our customers and refining NXPowerLite, we are proud to hear from you that you find our software is both simple and effective, and perhaps more importantly that you've found us as a company great to deal with. We strive hard on both counts.

A big thank you is in order to all of our customers for supporting us and giving us the opportunity to create these products. We feel truly privileged to be working on them for you.  We'd also like specifically to thank everyone who contributed to our survey at the beginning of this year. Thanks to you we've had lots of great ideas for features that will make NXPowerLite work better for you. You’ll recognize many of these in version 6, others will be arriving soon in point releases. We've really enjoyed working on this release, and we hope you enjoy using it just as much.  

We've had a fantastic time so far, and we have lots of new ideas for future updates and look forward to many more years of continuing to develop our core product. Please do keep sending us your ideas for new improvements and features - without you there wouldn't be NXPowerLite.

Mike Power
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