FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near
future?
H.Miller: We provide the smartest and easiest solution to
help our customers with their daily work. We’ll keep improving UTFCast
Professional. We are also investigating the consumer market and looking forward
to have a chance to provide high quality software and service for the general
public.
FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for
UTFCast Professional? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new
software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
H.Miller: The initial code base of UTFCast Professional was
created for a text conversion tool about 8 years ago. I have been using the
tool for about 8 years. Actually I didn’t expect there are so many text
converters out there in the market but most of them are not satisfying. Some of
them require complex settings for each file, while most of them do not handle
large files. So I rewrote the tool and released it to the public in January
2009, when UTFCast Express was born. In a few weeks I got emails from many
users saying that they love the way UTFCast Express works and request new
features, so my team started the UTFCast Professional project and released
version one on October 1st, 2009. The most inspiring thing is that almost every
registered customer of UTFCast Professional tells us it really helps! So we
kept optimizing it and excavating new features for it. We also have a plan to
develop software for the mobile market, but we will guarantee keeping improving
the current software first.
FW Editor: UTFCast Professional is one of the best text
convertors from the market. What is the secret?
H.Miller: It’s fast, easy and smart. I’ve been using the
tool for more than 8 years. Also we put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and
develop its feature for our customers just like for ourselves.
FW Editor: Do you plan to improve or change UTFCast
Professional in any way? If yes, how are you going to do that?
H.Miller: Well, there will be an easier, smarter and more
flexible UTFCast Professional in the future. We keep improving it all the time.
We adjust interface elements and improve the conversion flow to provide a
better user experience. We also take advantage of the latest operating system
features to provide the best experience and performance.
FW Editor: It is possible to convert text files larger than
1 TB?
H.Miller: Yes. Most text converters need to load the whole
file into memory at one time to maintain a continuous binary stream such that
binary data can be correctly mapped into the character table. But loading such
a large amount of data can lead to memory overruns. UTFCast Professional
supports ‘convert-on-the-fly’ feature that allows a partial binary stream to be
correctly mapped. A file can be split into unlimited parts and converted
without loading the whole file at one time.
FW Editor: What are the advantages of using UTFCast
Professional over any other similar product?
H.Miller: It’s smart and simple. It detects file format and
only picks up text files to convert, detects codepage for each text file rather
than the need to manually select, and the directory structure can also be
maintained. Everyone can convert millions of files with only a few mouse
clicks.
It’s fast. We have tested most of the similar products in the market
and compared the conversion speed. 90% of them can only convert about 8 to 12
MB of data per second, but UTFCast Professional can convert about 40MB of data
per second. If there are many files need to convert, UTFCast Professional
greatly saves time.
It can handle extra-large file and still maintain a high
speed conversion. In our tests, most of the text converters can only convert a
small file up to several MBs, only a few of them can handle up to around 800MB
but they most took over 10 minutes to convert. None of them can handle files
larger than 1GB. UTFCast Professional can convert any size of large file and
still maintain a high speed of 40MB per second. It is the only choice if you
need to convert large files.
FW Editor: What are the main differences between UTFCast
Professional and UTFCast Express?
H.Miller: UTFCast Professional has a more precise file
format detection engine, supports most of the Unicode format and over 30 native
codepages, has the ability to handle extra-large file, and the conversion speed
is 3 times faster than the Express edition.
FW Editor: What is your favorite UTFCast Professional
feature and why?
H.Miller: My favorite feature is the format and codepage
auto detection. If I have 1000 files in a directory, some of them are already
Unicode files but some are not, without the auto detection feature I need to
verify every file and specify hundreds of times of the codepage, it will take
at least half an hour before starting the conversion. But I can finish the job
in a second with having the auto detection feature.
FW Editor: Now, to end our small interview, is there any
message you would like to send to UTFCast Professional users?
H.Miller: I would like to thank every single person and
every company who has become our clients. Without their support and experiences
shared, our product cannot be so successful.