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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."
It's called Spellbound
It's a great Firefox extension. You can spell check any field.
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.
Let me know when this electronic thumb can signal spaceships for a lift. ;)
The coolest voice ever.
How about Putty.
Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.
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
http://gmail.com
Don't even say you can't get an invite.
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.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hooray I can be on topic for a change....
:( - 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.
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
VLC comes to mind. I'm pretty sure all the codecs are integrated.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
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.
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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 $90-100 is somewhat more common).
What is more of an issue to me is that the application not go bonkers with write cycles being somewhat precious with flash memory. It would be nice if the various linux filesystem drivers could have a mount option that spread out writes (since fragmentation isn't much of an issue on a media with essentially no seek time).
Please help metamoderate.
So I guess by "ultra-portable" they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn't touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o' crap left over behind?
Isn't this how all software should be released?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Not really. The problem is that many people don't have access to the "admin" account. You can't really install apps (you can "install" them to your desktop and hope an admin doesn't get notified), and can't change any settings. Lots of admins have draconian disk quota policies.
.bat file to tell it to start and use that profile vice creating one under "Documents and Settings/$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.
.pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.
Firefox can be unzipped to a folder. Another folder can act as the profile. You need
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
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I imagine that could lead to an akward moment...
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!
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.