Portableapps.com – your work, your life take them with you

by Roger Davis

It’s that time of year when some of us get back to work or school after our short holidays, so I thought I’d share with you a cool application that can make your life this year, a little less complex, more fun and productive.

Transforms your USB DriveSome time ago an associate of mine introduced me to a utility called PortableApps which can be downloaded free of cost from www.portableapps.com. This is a suite of applications that transforms your USB Flash Drive from a mere storage device into a sweet portable drive, from which you can run a wide variety of portable applications, ranging from a media player to a web browser. With a PortableApps equipped USB Flash Drive you can carry your documents, browser bookmarks, email and portable applications in your pocket with you, wherever you go. They can be customized just the way you like them, and be used anytime, anywhere and on any computer. Because the various applications are self contained and run straight from your USB Flash Drive, there is no need to install the software on any PC that you’re going to use them on, all you need to do is plug in and play. Sure beats carrying around that big ol’ laptop to get work done on the go doesn’t it?

What do you get

Some applications that come with the Standard Edition of the PortableApps Suite are: ClamWin Portable, an anti-virus software; Mozilla Firefox Portable, a popular web browser; Gaim Portable, an instant messaging application; Mozilla Sunbird portable, a calendar and task manager; Mozilla Thunderbird, a portable e-mail client; and OpenOffice.org Portable Office Suite, consisting of a word processor which can edit and save documents in the Microsoft Word document format, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a drawing package and a database manager. All of this can run comfortably from a 256 MB Flash Drive. There are also a host of other portable applications which can be downloaded at http://portableapps.com/apps, and new applications are being added all the time.

For someone like myself, who often has to use a public computer lab (because I’m also a student), I can carry my stuff around with me, plug my Flash Drive in, go on any website I want to using Firefox Portable, chat with whomever I want to on any one of the popular chat platforms such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger using Gaim Portable, upload or download files to or from any of my web development client’s websites using FileZilla or even edit images using portable Adobe Photoshop or GIMP Portable. This of course may require more space than 256 MB. I personally use a 4GB USB Flash Drive. One of the sweetest things about PortableApps is that when I’m done, no trace of my activities is left behind on any of the PC’s that I may use. That’s right, no data, no backup files, no cookies or cached browser pages are left behind. They are all stored safely on my USB Flash Drive. This makes for good personal security.

Did I mention that there are also cool portable games that you can get for your new hyped up USB Flash Drive? Yes there are. Games range from puzzle games like Sudoku to arcade games like Bricks2000 which is a Tetris clone.

There you have it folks, go on over to www.portableapps.com and get your USB Flash Drive some super powers!