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 pick 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.