Portable Applications Let You Take It With You February 17, 2010
Do Anything and Take Everything With You with Portable Applications
Fellow TechRepublic author Greg Schulz wrote in August 2009 about “10 Cool Things You Can Do with a USB Flash Drive.” #1 on his list was “Run portable applications.” I personally am hooked on USB thumb drives…I think they’re the best thing since sliced bread so his list intrigued me. However, when I started to research his item #1 further, that particular one intrigued me even more.
At Portableapps.com, not only can you download enough programs to do everything you need while on the go, you can also do it for free. FREE. Everything is open source and everything is absolutely free.
Here’s what you can find there:
Portableapps.com Platform
The Portableapps.com platform provides you with a Windows-like program and utility list and also makes it easy to add and remove portable apps from your list of available applications. It will even accept portable apps from other sites, you just need to follow the proper process to get them to show up on the app menu.
Portableapps.com Suite
You can download an entire suite of programs from the site which will allow you to do everything you probably do now on your laptop. And this suite only includes a subset of what is actually available on the site.
All versions of the PortableApps.com Suite include the integrated PortableApps.com Menu (pictured below) and the PortableApps.com Backup utility along with a set of custom icons, an autoplay configuration, folders and a quick start shortcut. In addition, the packages include:
- Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (web browser)
- Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition (email)
- Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition (calendar/tasks)
- ClamWin Portable (antivirus)
- Pidgin Portable (instant messaging)
- Sumatra PDF Portable (PDF reader
- KeePass Password Safe Portable (password manager)
- Sudoku Portable (game)
- Mines-Perfect Portable (game)
- CoolPlayer+ Portable (audio player)
- OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite)
- Writer (word processor)
- Calc (spreadsheet)
- Impress (presentations)
- Base (database utility)
- Draw (drawing)
Keep in mind, the Suite contains only a subset of what’s available on the Portableapps.com site. They’ve packaged those together because they are the core productivity tools that everyone uses. Check the site out - it’s definitely worth your time.
