Bring your Favorite Applications with You - Portable Apps
August 30, 2007
I’m sure that you have been at a friends house, or tried to show a co-worker something, and they don’t have an application that you need. Or maybe you want to show them how much better your favorite application is at doing something, but of course, they don’t have it installed.
Portable Apps is a suite of applications that can be installed on removable media, such as a flash drive or removable hard drive, and then can be run from the same removable media, but on many machines. All of the program’s settings, files, data and executables are all stored on that drive.
One example that comes to mind is this: At work, your company uses SharePoint team services, Microsoft’s free Portal application. Since some of SharePoint’s features are not supported by FireFox, the IT department has forced Internet Explorer as the default browser. Being a little bit of a rebel, you prefer to surf the net in FireFox.
With portable apps, you can just install FireFox Portable on your flash drive, and then anytime you want to surf the web with it, you can just pop in the flash drive, and run FireFox.
As an added bonus, your cookies, favorites, etc are all right there. Bring the same flash drive home and, you guessed it, all those settings are still there.
You can download the Portable Apps Suite, or just download and install individual applications. Uninstalling individual applications is as easy as deleting the folder that they are installed in, so I would suggest downloading the suite, and then customizing what you have installed.
I have to thank Art for pointing Portable Apps out to me in the first place. Now I’m addicted.
Tomorrow I’m going to post about one of my favorites.
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Posted in Applications, Portable Apps
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August 30th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Wow, this has real promise for a number of purposes. Very cool.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:15 am
Yes, PortableApps are schweet, if I may use that word.
I use Firefox Portable every day. It’s nice because the plugins I use for Firefox ( del.icio.us, Adblock Plus, TabScope, and the User Agent Switcher) work seamlessly with the PortableApps version. Your mileage may vary with other plugins. Also, my browser history, cookies, and settings go wherever I go. Never again do I have to deal with a different browsing experience if I’m using a computer away from home
The next useful for me are Putty Portable and WinSCP Portable to maintain my servers.
I also have OpenOffice Portable but don’t use it very often.
Something else that’s pretty cool is that you don’t even need to use PortableApps software with it. Just about any portable software will work, just dump it in the correct folder on your hard drive and the menu system will pick it up automatically. I use a portable version of RSSOwl (an RSS feed reader) this way and something else called TotalText (a notes and calendar application).
PortableApps are useful in so many ways. You can’t know just how incredibly useful they are until you toss some on to your USB drive and start using them.
One thing, though. If you plan to use a lot of them, and especially OpenOffice Portable, and carry around a lot of other documents with you, I’d suggest using at least a 4GB USB drive. I use one and have plenty of space to spare without worrying about whether I have room to stick just one more Word document on there.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:26 am
@Phil
These sure are handy. I’m not nearly as addicted as Art is, but they really are great.
@Art
I was going to say, you don’t realize how useful they are until you forget your flash drive.
Right now I have a 1G drive, and still have a bunch of room. I’ll have to look at the other apps you mentioned.