Portable Apps

Posted on November 18, 2006, 9:25 pm by cipher27 under Cool Gadgets

Portable applications are applications that don't need to be installed, these programs have very few or no dependencies and can be downloaded and used directly. Portable applications are especially useful when you are a busy executive always on the road or just some one who wants to use the same applications at home and at work. You may want to have access to all your emails all the time but don't want to carry around a PDA or a clunky laptop.

Portable applications have made quite a splash. The falling prices of flash drives and the popularity of open source applications like Firefox has led to the increasing adoption of portable applications. Most USB thumb drives and MP3 players appear as USB mass storage device under windows, which is a fancy way of saying that they appear as external hard drives and like any other hard drive you can copy or install programs onto it. A few crafty people made use of this fact and started carrying around small programs that they needed everyday on their USB drives thus giving birth to a new class of portable applications.

Imagine have a lot of bookmarks on your home computer and would like to carry the same bookmarks with you where ever you go. Social bookmarking sites such as http://del.icio.us offer the convenience of uploading your book marks and accessing them from any computer. The main drawback of such a system is that in the absence of a network connection you will be left without your bookmarks, in such cases you can download the portable edition of the popular Firefox browser onto your USB drive and use it anywhere this way all your settings,bookmarks and extensions travel with you where ever you go.

Another good use of portable drives is as a disaster recovery platform you can have a copy of the latest antivirus, data recovery software, spyware checking software and other system tools which can be used any time you want to troubleshoot any problem with your computer.

Some programs like the APPonKey and the MojoPac Allow you to carry your entire profile in your pocket.

Here is a list of some really cool applications you can use on a USB stick.