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Tomahawk Gold v3.5 Puts New Technology To The Test

NativeWinds has thrown down the gauntlet with the latest release of the Tomahawk Gold Software package. Taking document storage to the next level with the newly developed compression/encryption technology, NativeWinds is striving to become a major contender in the word processing market. Tomahawk Gold was already one of the most feature rich word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform.

New CTD file format compression/encryption.

One of the most requested features for our Tomahawk software was the ability to add password protection to documents. We are proud to say that after months of experimentation, we have come up with a solution. Our new file format - Compressed Tomahawk Document (CTD), allows users to add a password to encrypt the document using a 128 bit Rijndael (AES) encryption cipher. As an added bonus, our new CTD file format stores the document to disk in a highly compressed format. The savings in used disk space is huge. Documents saved in CTD format can be as small as 24% of the normal storage requirements of standard Tomahawk documents, which were already saved in a compact binary format.

When documents are saved with the CTD format, Encryption/Decryption and Compression/Decompression are done entirely in memory at the time of opening or saving. That means documents which contain sensitive information are never written to disk in an unsecured format that could be detected later with specialized software.

We wanted to see how our new CTD format would stack up against the leading software packages in terms of disk space requirements for documents. We tested Tomahawk Gold v3.5 against the two leading word processors - Microsoft Word 2000 and OpenOffice v2.03. In addition, we threw in the two leading archivers that create highly compressed archives to really put our technology to the test. We used the latest versions of WinRar and WinZip using the 'Best Compression' settings for each of the two archive programs.

Our tests were preformed on a 4 year old HP Pavilion running WinXP Pro with service pack 2 installed, Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.26GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM.

We started with 4 files created in Microsoft Word and saved as RTF files. We then opened each of those 4 files in Tomahawk Gold and saved in standard format (tmd) and in our new Compressed format (ctd). Next we opened those 4 files in OpenOffice and saved them as ODT files, which are actually zip compatible files that can be opened with most archive programs. Finally we took those same RTF files and had WinRar and WinZip do their best compression on each of the files. In the 4 files tested, WinRar won the compression test 3 out of 4 times - barely! Not bad results considering we were comparing Tomahawk against the two best known archivers!

Note: version 3.6 of Tomahawk uses full unicode support which increased saved file sizes slightly but greatly improved compatibility in the International community.