Portable apps suites - is there a good one?

[techidave]

I  think it would be very good to have a DC recommended portable apps, maybe even their own build of it.  That is if it doesn't interfere with some copyright or other legal thing that we are unaware of.

I still think this is harder than it needs to be and my experience with LBC last night wasn't all that great.  for one thing it kept locking up on me.  I am on XP pro sp3.  but that is another  post.

The cool part of LBC of what I could tell in the online helps is you can have more than one instance of it running. 

I run portable apps from the file manager also but sometimes takes some looking to find the right one, hence a launcher for it.

It doesn't matter whose launcher you would use for portable apss, Liberkey or PortableApps, they will install stuff by default you may not want.  So a custom made DC build?? 

[daddydave]

It doesn't matter whose launcher you would use for portable apss, Liberkey or PortableApps, they will install stuff by default you may not want.

Nope. You must have missed the "Platform" version of Liberkey (which is easy to do). By the way, Liberkey looks like Überkey through my bifocals. Getting old, I guess, but I digress.

[app103]

It doesn't matter whose launcher you would use for portable apss, Liberkey or PortableApps, they will install stuff by default you may not want.

-techidave (September 08, 2010, 05:47 AM)

I created a simple launcher a long time ago that can act as a portable launcher, if you are willing to do a little simple tweaking. It is a panel of 100 buttons and doesn't come with any extra crap. Once configured, it's only 2 files: the launcher and an .ini file.

• Place it at the root of the portable drive. (you can place more than 1 instance there, just rename them to give each one a unique file name)
• Right click a button and select an .exe file to associate with it. If the file has an icon, that icon will show on the button. (If it doesn't have one, it will be blank  )
• When you have all the buttons configured, close the launcher and it will save the configuration to an .ini file that matches the name you have given to the launcher's .exe file.
• Open up the .ini file in a text editor and fix the paths to be relative to the launcher...remove the drive letter part.
• Save the .ini file.

Now it will work as portable.

If you like it, use it. If you don't, then don't use it. Just please don't ask me for features or hand me bug reports because I do not have any plans at this time for continuing development on the project. I had considered releasing it as open source to allow someone else to do that, but if I did, it's likely to only make people laugh and never get any improvements. (I created it in less than 3 minutes, without writing a single line of code, and its original purpose was to get my daughter to shut up about all my taskbar shortcuts on a shared 9x computer with a single user account. All it is, is 100 instances of TJanRunButton)

[Target]

FYI here are some alternatives to the pensuites you've already quoted

• Winizio
• Lupo
• MJM
• WinPenPack
• C-Pen Suite

I've used both Lupo and WinPenPack, but the others I googled.

There are others, but no doubt you can do the search as well as I can

The trouble with these things is that they are all somebody elses collection, so while there will always be some overlap, there will also be a lot of stuff that you don't want

[4wd]

It doesn't matter whose launcher you would use for portable apss, Liberkey or PortableApps, they will install stuff by default you may not want.

-techidave (September 08, 2010, 05:47 AM)

Except CodySafe.

Just choose not to install the optional free tools/applications - all you'll end up with is the launcher/application manager, a drive eject command and a DiskDoctor command, (to check flash drive filesystem health and detect whether the AutoRun.inf has been turned into a virus) - 3.54MB in all.

Actually, if you choose to install the optional free tools/applications then it only adds another 600kB and it's just language files, folder icons and a few sound effects.

So go ahead, be daring and leave the optional tools in

[Deozaan]

Hmm...how about a portable app updating utility?  How would one go about doing that?

-techidave (September 08, 2010, 05:38 AM)

Read the post just before yours:

Hmm...how about a portable app updating utility?  How would one go about doing that?

-superboyac (September 07, 2010, 10:12 PM)

I think PortableApps.com is working on the next version of their launcher thingy that will update their apps. Not sure how far out it is though.

EDIT: It's in beta which you can try out here:

http://portableapps...._2.0_beta_5_released

-Deozaan (September 08, 2010, 12:57 AM)

It doesn't matter whose launcher you would use for portable apss, Liberkey or PortableApps, they will install stuff by default you may not want.

-techidave (September 08, 2010, 05:47 AM)

That's not accurate either. You can download the PortableApps Launcher separately from any other apps.

[CWuestefeld]

what i'd really like to do is come up with something so that LBC and FARR can parse the portable-app-collection formats, so that you can use LBC and FARR as a drop-in replacement for those portable app menu launchers without doing any special configuration.

-mouser (September 07, 2010, 07:32 PM)

That's an incredibly good idea!

I use WinPenPack, and from what I know about the way they store their launcher data (it's all in an XML file), it should be pretty straightforward to do it for this case.

[techidave]

That's not accurate either. You can download the PortableApps Launcher separately from any other apps.

Ok so you got me there.  Most of the ones I have checked will have a suite of apps that come with the launcer.  Some of those default apps I may not want.  And yes, I probably could just download the launcher only and then pick and choose.  But that's not what I want.  If I get the "complete" package it could have open office plus a whole bunch of stuff.  I may not want open office but want the other stuff.

[tomos]

That's not accurate either. You can download the PortableApps Launcher separately from any other apps.

Ok so you got me there.  Most of the ones I have checked will have a suite of apps that come with the launcer.  Some of those default apps I may not want.  And yes, I probably could just download the launcher only and then pick and choose.  But that's not what I want.  If I get the "complete" package it could have open office plus a whole bunch of stuff.  I may not want open office but want the other stuff.

-techidave (September 09, 2010, 01:51 PM)

seems to me if you're fussy about what you want you're going to have to download the launcher and the apps seperately i.e. have a little bit of work
Or I guess you could download a package and delete what you dont want

[ajp]

I've noticed that PortableApps on a thumb drive doesn't do the autorun in Windows 7. Just FYI.

-Deozaan (September 06, 2010, 09:30 PM)

Yes: Windows 7 has disabled auto-run on thumb drives by default (it's not only about PortableApps). This was an excellent decision make by Microsoft, because auto-run was a perfect way to propagate malware. Every XP/Vista machine I installed, I always turned off auto-run before anything else. Minor annoyance for some use cases, but a good decision, I believe.

[superboyac]

I've noticed that PortableApps on a thumb drive doesn't do the autorun in Windows 7. Just FYI.

-Deozaan (September 06, 2010, 09:30 PM)

Yes: Windows 7 has disabled auto-run on thumb drives by default (it's not only about PortableApps). This was an excellent decision make by Microsoft, because auto-run was a perfect way to propagate malware. Every XP/Vista machine I installed, I always turned off auto-run before anything else. Minor annoyance for some use cases, but a good decision, I believe.

-ajp (September 17, 2010, 11:29 AM)

I've gotten one like that myself, last year.  My sister got some facebook malware on my mom's laptop.  i couldn't do anything on the laptop, so i had to use a portable virus program to clean it from my usb.  but then, i took that usb drive to work and infected my work computer.  I cleaned it eventually, but I was super pissed at my little sis.  Then, my older sister got a very similar thing, and it happened right when I was sitting there while she was on facebook.  It was pretty clever, so I didn't blame them.

[munyard]

I don't pretend to know which are best, but I've got some mileage out of placing my Portable Applications in C:\Apps and then using Folder Share aka Windows Live Sync to sync that directory/folder between my work and home PC's.  This ensures that the micro & portable applications I enjoy are easily accessible although I should probably look for a way to reliably sync C:\Apps with my Thumb Drive.