2007-10-20 #1

Portable Applications

Because I currently need to use multiple PCs with different setups, I looked for a possibility to share some applications and configurations. Luckily there are already lots of options and applications to select from.

Portable Apps overview

Portable Apps are applications running directly from a removable device (USB Stick) and which do not interfere with the local system's configuration (registry). This allows you to carry your apps and data around including your configs and settings.

There is a U3 hardware supported standard, but I am going with the simple independent approach.

MyApps

Main source for my portable apps is PortableApps.com. The site offers a menu application and also sorts and provides many portable apps ready to be included in the menu. Currently I am using:

• 7zip
• Audacity - sound editor
• ClamWin - virus scanner
• eraser
• FileZilla
• Firefox
• GIMP
• MPlayer
• Notepad++
• OpenOffice
• Pidgin
• PuTTY
• Sumatra PDF Viewer
• Thunderbird
• Toucan
• VLC
• WinSCP

additions

In addition to the hosted apps on portableapps.com, following applications are also running from my usb stick:

• HHD HexEditor (an old version)
• IrfanView - Picture viewer and mini-editor (including batch processing)
• DeepBurner - Burns CD/DVD/ISO Images
• yEd - Java Graph Editor
• TrueCrypt
• Skype

To start skype, use these command lines in a batch file (create the data directory before):

To include a batch file (used for skype) into the portable menu, I used the JPSoft Batch Compiler 1.0 (kindly now hosted and described at http://www.hollmen.dk/articles/batch.htm). To run a java application, use the launch4j - a Cross-platform Java executable wrapper - tool, which enables you to just launch java or even package the jre into the created exe. There is a quite comprehensive guide at informIt.