20 years of NXPowerLite

On November 20, 2021, NXPowerLite Desktop - our first software product - turns 20 years old! We previously wrote about the evolution of our desktop file compressor in a blog post celebrating the first 12 years of NXPowerLite. Half jokingly we said we were looking forward to the next 12 years - and yet here we are 8 years later with no sign of slowing down.

Since that blog post, we have released three more major versions, and 33 minor point updates. The Windows edition is now on version 9, with a version 10 on the horizon, and we finally brought NXPowerLite Desktop to the Mac in April 2014. Since its launch, NXPowerLite Desktop has been downloaded over 5 million times.

The core compression engine now also powers a server edition used by thousands of companies to free up storage, as well as our free online compressor wecompress.com that helps more than 500,000 monthly users.

We feel very privileged to have achieved 20 years of success with a product that we conceived and built from scratch. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers who have supported us by using NXPowerLite software during this time.

A big thank you also to the many people who worked at Neuxpower and helped to build NXPowerLite into the tool it is today, and our partners around the world who represent our software to their customers locally - especially our premier partner OceanBridge, an incredible company that specialise in bringing international software into the Japanese market.

Following the tradition started in our previous blog post, we wanted to share a quick summary of the highlights from the last three major versions.

Version 7

30th October 2015

PDF is a complicated file format, so version 7 was dominated by the addition of support for more attributes, to ensure more PDF files could be compressed. We did also manage to speed up the compression of JPEG files too.

• Windows 10 and Office 2016 support

• Lotus Notes 9 support

• PDF compression improved by support for:

  • ASCII encoded PDFs

  • font subsetting 

  • images with inverted default decode arrays

  • double filtered images

  • PDFs created by certain Fujitsu scanners

Version 8

20th February 2018

We added to the list of files NXPowerLite can compress with this release, including PNG and TIFF images. We also made it easier to compress files in batches, and to switch between custom settings each time you used the software, depending on your requirements. 

• Compress PNG and TIFF images

• Store and use custom compression profiles

• New feature for adding folders of files

• Replace original files without creating backups

You can read more about exactly what we added in NXPowerLite Desktop 8.

Version 9

24th November 2020

For this release we wanted to focus on big improvements to the user experience. To help with this we wrote to our customers asking them to share what currently didn’t work well when using NXPowerLite. We received some great feedback, and from it we were able to make some significant improvements to the experience of using NXPowerLite.

• Choose settings and profile when compressing from Explorer

• Store and access frequently used folders

• Export results

• Support for files stored in OneDrive and Sharepoint

• Compress Microsoft Office files created by other apps

• Flatten embedded charts in DOCX and PPTX files

• Compress header and footer images in DOCX files

You can read more about exactly what we added to NXPowerLite Desktop 9.

Check out the NXPowerLite Desktop product page to find out more and to download a free trial.