Ever since I got my new, sexy 8GB USB flash drive, I’ve been into the whole “portable apps” scene.
Portable Applications are basically standalone applications; they are applications that are ready to run without having to install them. Obviously if you have a flash drive, you would want to have these little gems so you can have your useful applications with you all the time, ready to be run in any [supported] computer.
Aside from the obvious benefit portable apps have for removable drive use, what I realized is that I find them ideal to use even on a local environment. In fact, I can go as far as to say that I wish all applications were portable in nature, and I’ll tell you why…
Consider This…
I have a triple-boot scenario in my computer; with three redundant installs of windows in my machine (two installations of XP and one Vista installation). One of the major nuances I quickly realized is that it’s such a waste of space (not to mention a pain in the ass) to install multiple instances of the same software on all three OS installations.
As I said, one partition is for my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) so I have my audio software installed there. No problem, it’s the only partition that I’ll have to install ANY audio software I have. I also have the XP installation for my work (as well as a game drive). So for the games part, obviously I would only install them in that partition; everything is still peachy.
Now how about stuff like the Adobe Creative Suite. I could say that I use Flash, Photoshop, etc. for work, but that doesn’t mean they’re used exclusively for work. Or here’s a better example: an office suite (e.g. Microsoft Office) to open those commonly available documents (word, powerpoint)
So let’s consider Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. I personally chose NOT to install them in the DAW partition since I want to keep that OS as “clean” as possible. But what about for Vista and the other XP installation? I’d have to install them twice, configure them twice for each system to probably the exact same settings I prefer to work with. Once can see how this redundancy can be a waste of space, especially since these suite of applications take up a big chunk of hard drive space.
Enter Portable Applications
As previously stated, portable apps are standalone applications; they need not be installed. What does this entail? You can have a SINGLE application for all your installations. Also, since their settings are usually stored in the same folder (or a subfolder) relative to where the main app resides in, for the most part, it retains the settings regardless of where you’re running it from.
Unfortunately, there’s still no “portable MS Office 2007” or a “portable Adobe CS3,” but I have a bunch of applications which have portable versions of such as uTorrent (bittorrent), Firefox (browser), Trillian (multi-IM), FileZilla (FTP), FoxIt Reader (PDF reader), VLC (video/media player), OpenOffice (just in case), etc. etc.
The first four apps mentioned alone are a big deal in the “portable” perspective. You can access the same Firefox application from anywhere and still retain your bookmarks, same goes with Trillian and your contact list. I can resume my downloads regardless of what OS I boot into. Plus, I can now chat and surf while making music in the DAW partition.
So I have shortcuts on all three partitions pointing to a different partition which contains all these portable/standalone applications. Would you believe I even have a portable Photoshop CS2? hahahaha. So yes, I have CS3 installed on two of the three partitions, but now I can do some quick graphics editing as well on the DAW partition if I wanted to.
Furthermore I have all those Protable apps in a folder, which I synchronize with the Flash drive. So I always have a mirror copy of the latest “state” of the applications (and settings) even on my USB drive.
You may be asking “Why the redundancy now; when the point of having portable apps is so you can have them consolidated in one place?” The reason why I don’t use the flash drive when in the local machine is because USB is still slower than a native hard disk. So running an app like Trillian, will perform considerably slower when running from a USB device.
So if you share the same sentiment as I do, then you can get started right here and here.
What about the Macs Users?
As Apple users know, you don’t need installers for most of the Mac applications. You simply drag them to your Applications folder. Do not be misled however; these are not true portable applications. The settings/preferences of these applications are stored in your ~/Libarary/Application Support folder. So if you plunk them into your USB and run them in another Mac, it’ll be like running the app for the first time (no settings retained, etc.)
However, don’t fret, there are also Portable Apps available for Macs.