Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere

museumpeace writes "On his blog, Jeremy Wagstaff makes available a list of the apps now packaged for USB thumbdrives. He also wrote these up in WSJ but that will cost you. My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go."

Comments

spelunking cheque

[SuperBanana]

Apparently "spell checker" is not on the list...

I know an Ultaportable App

[Stevyn]

It's called Spellbound

It's a great Firefox extension. You can spell check any field.

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[Tribbin]

Especially usefull for spelling-nazi.

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[stratjakt]

You can rag on them all you want, but we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US.

I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.

Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language. After all, deriding someone for using slang isn't "PC".

I shouldn't have to recieve an email, only to play phone-tag all day to find out what the fuck they're talking about.

This one particular dork tries to make everything read more "official" by Capitalizing Every Word In Every Sentence.

Gah, beurocrats. All they do is have meetings and set up phone conferences all day.

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[gardyloo]

we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US

beurocrats

*cough*

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[InfiniteWisdom]

Picking on the ocassional typo is one thing, but soem peeple cant seam too speel on dam theng wright, too teh pint off makeing there psots imposible too reed

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[Badfysh]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn brian deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

regarding bookmarks...

[jkakar]

I've recently been using http://del.icio.us combined with a live bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar. Now, on the 3 or 4 machines I used regularly I have centralized access to bookmarks. In my case, this turns out to be less hassle than carrying around a thumb drive.

Re:regarding bookmarks...

[christopherfinke]

I've recently been using http://del.icio.us combined with a live bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar.

You might want to try out Chipmark. It's a service created at the University of Minnesota similar to del.icio.us, but it's open source, and they provide a Firefox/Mozilla extension. It's pretty good, but then again, I might be biased, since I'm part of the development team.

Yeah, but what I really need...

[Faust7]

Let me know when this electronic thumb can signal spaceships for a lift. ;)

Don't tell me...

[eric_foxx]

is it already /.ed? Now there's one thing that is the same everywhere I go...

Uh huh...

[Telastyn]

How about Putty.

Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.

Re:Uh huh...

[stratjakt]

Until you're behind a firewall that won't let you through, which I was all last week.

It was ridiculous, I was working at this cities administration building, and they provide (in tandem with the local university) free wifi outside, which won't penetrate through the walls.

I had to keep running outside to connect to my home office' vpn, to get to the stuff I needed, as I too, am one of those "I can do it all remotely" types.

Lesson learned, next time I pack it all up to take with me. Of course, in my case, that means a portable 80 gig drive, since I couldn't fit all our stuff on flash.

easier ways to have your bookmarks portable

[philo_enyce]

i just have a wiki where my bookmarks live. anywhere i go, i open to that page and voila, my bookmarks. since it's a wiki, i can add pages to it from anywhere. no fuss no muss and no cost. philo

Ultraportable Email

[stinkyfingers]

http://gmail.com

Don't even say you can't get an invite.

How big are these apps?

[billstewart]

Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are. For some things, like Email, the big problem isn't really the code, it's the data (e.g. you might have a 4MB program install but 100MB of email.)

Portable Firefox

[AbRASiON]

Hooray I can be on topic for a change....

As a portable firefox user, I've got to say I'm generally quite happy with the package.
It seems a little quirky I must admit like this problem.

Although this seems illogical, I've found installing some extensions don't work the first or second time, even though the instructions outline doing it "twice" should do it - it seems to not like the "delay" of working with a USB disk.

Now the solution I've found is to copy portable firefox to the local disk, which is obviously quicker and then set it up exactly how you like it (be sure to edit the portable firefox.ini file to set the path) - once you've set it up how you like it, copy it back to the usb drive.

Also the bookmark code within ffox does a lot of read / writes when doing ANYTHING with them - so it's tremendously slow, again I'd recommend doing it all on a local disk then copying back when it's finally setup how you like it.

It also doesn't remember cookies (obviously)
However for the love of god I'd like to be able to say setup cookies just for a couple of sites :( - it does remember passwords but some sites remember a heck of a lot of stuff with the cookies - if I could just make it remmeber cookies for say my top 30 sites I hit, it would be so much handier.

Re:HUGE question about media

[BigZaphod]

VLC comes to mind. I'm pretty sure all the codecs are integrated.

Bookmarks Synchronizer

[fafaforza]

My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go.

I prefer Bookmarks Synchronizer. Upload your bookmarks to an ftp server when closing FireFox if bookmarks changed. Download them when starting it back up and the cpies differ. All automatically.

here you go

[sh0rtie]

no registry or local disk writing, plays Xvid/DivX etc, the only thing is a lack of a decent and small filesize gui, but iam sure that will come in time, works great with autorun.inf and (CD|DVD)Rw?

http://csant.info/mplayer

and

http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/

Re:Thest are great... except - the only problem is

[NanoGator]

"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"

She did the right thing, good for her.

She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.

You should be happy she made that choice.

flash is cheap

[SuperBanana]

Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are.

With USB thumb drives costing about or less than $50 for 512MB, I'd have to say that space isn't much of an issue at all. I've seen 1GB flash drives for under $70 (though $90-100 is somewhat more common).

What is more of an issue to me is that the application not go bonkers with write cycles being somewhat precious with flash memory. It would be nice if the various linux filesystem drivers could have a mount option that spread out writes (since fragmentation isn't much of an issue on a media with essentially no seek time).

Shouldn't this be how all software is designed?

[Combuchan]

So I guess by "ultra-portable" they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn't touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o' crap left over behind?

Isn't this how all software should be released?

Re:Portable firefox?

[Bios_Hakr]

Not really. The problem is that many people don't have access to the "admin" account. You can't really install apps (you can "install" them to your desktop and hope an admin doesn't get notified), and can't change any settings. Lots of admins have draconian disk quota policies.

Firefox can be unzipped to a folder. Another folder can act as the profile. You need .bat file to tell it to start and use that profile vice creating one under "Documents and Settings/$user/whatever/". After that, removing disk-caching and boosting the memory cache helps out. Add a shortcut to the desktop of the client pointing to the .bat file on the thumb drive and you are set.

VLC 0.8.1 works great from a thumb drive and plays just about anything you throw at it. When my coworkers curse the admin for not having $codec, they come see me.

WinRAR works perfectly once "installed" to a thumb drive. All you need to do on the client is choose "Open With..." and browse to find winrar.exe on the thumbdrive.

I also have cygwin on my thumbdrive to show off the power of command-line completion to my peers. Plus it always comes in handy for various tasks.

I keep several documents on there too. A current copy of my resume, a list of sites and passwords, some random pr0n, helpful regedits, PHP books in .pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.

BTW, banish the thought that pics of my kids and pr0n might be one and the same...they aren't.

We also keep USB keys in the safe with server passwords and configs, router passwords and configs, VPN clients, Sniffer Pro, and anything else the NOC guys ask for. They can literally take the key to any site and turn any laptop into a network config workstation.

It's amazing some of the random shit we find on there when they sign them back in.

Anyway, having tons of apps run from removable media is highly desired in my environment. The ammount of work some guys put into hacking these things to get $fav_app working from them is mind-numbing. To have someone else come up with a "certified" list could save tons of time.

forgot the link

[WankersRevenge]

great for form fields ... http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

that's the way it used to work

[idlake]

That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.

With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.

Re:Portable firefox?

[lsmeg]

I keep several documents on there too. A current copy of my resume, a list of sites and passwords, some random pr0n, helpful regedits, PHP books in .pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.

I imagine that could lead to an akward moment...

"Here, let me show you some pics of my kids..."

Inserts thumbdrive, opens "teens.jpg".

"Uhh... wrong file..."

OS X

[drdink]

This is one of the things I've come to like about Mac OS X. Most good applications are nothing but a single icon. This icon is represented by a single directory. If you drag this directory to a USB drive (and it fits), then it will run from that drive. Installing these sorts of applications consists of dragging them from an archive or disk image and dropping them into your folder of choice. I really wish more OS X applications were like this. Uninstalling is great. You just throw them away.

How long before viruses exploit this?

[cperciva]

Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.

I'm sure McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos will all love this idea, but I think I'll take a pass here...

This is EXACTLY what my site is all about...

[leftyfb]

http://www.no-install.com/ I just started this site a couple months ago because I could not find any 1 site out there to get portable applications. So I did a little research myself and thought I put them together in 1 place. Feel free to sign up, post links to downloads and/or articles to related news/software/anything.

Shortcomings of publishing one's bookmarks

[jbn-o]

There are some caveats to publishing one's bookmarks or participating in collaborative bookmarking which less technical users might not catch at first glance: you probably don't want to publish anything about your browsing if you bookmark:

• links to sensitive materials
• subjective and revealing title of bookmark (a bookmark called "Here's where John Smith lied to me about Jane" which points to a post on an e-mail list mirror)
• saved copies of a document in the bookmark tree (so if the browser can't reach the URL, it shows the saved webpage archive file instead)

SpyBot

[Lazyhound]

SpyBot S&D runs fine from a thumbdrive, which tends to come in handy.