Recently discovered there are interesting new entries within my loved portable apps:

1. Skype, never thought it could ever go portable.
2. TeamViewer, one of my favorite collaboration and remote support tools. Really powerful, give it a try.
3. 2X Client, RDP remote client with interesting features.
4. Google Chrome (beta 4), personally I found that a portable browser is a must.

For the complete list of portable apps give a look here. Notice that almost everything is free.

A wonderful week for one of my greatest passions: software ideas that rocks. In few days I discovered these fantastic two:

1) Ubiquity, a revolutionary way to interact the web in a natural way. Take a look at this impressive video and get it here. Oh… obviously: it’s for Firefox.

2) Dropbox, what SkyDrive should (and could) have been but is not. Easily and quickly synchronize your files with different PCs or access them directly from the browser.

The entire world wasted a lot of words in past two years about Web 2.0. I think that we shouldn’t care about version numbers, instead we only should care about great ideas (like this one, also from Mozilla Labs).

via Ale & Pietro.

It’s a long time I’m a big fan of portable apps, and – for at least two good reason – I use them not only from the USB pen, but even from system drive. First: as a developer I’ve a fresh OS installation relatively often and a simple copy is far smarter than many installations. Second, I can directly (via a network share) run portable apps from different machines (including virtuals I host). Not to tell the fact that settings and preferences always follow the apps and that my registry remains a little bit cleaner…

I wanna ensure you that, once you get used to this, it’s hard not to have it. So I started to collect the portable version of everything I can find, and currently my “Portable Apps” folder contains more than 50 apps. Every day I’m more convinced that almost everything should be portable, also (or especially) things like Visual Studio or other complex applications. I don’t want to list every single portable app I use, but let’s sat that…

I surf the web with Firefox Portable Edition and I read my email with Thunderbird Portable Edition and my feeds with FeedReader. I do IM with PSI (a jabber client – note that many jabber servers are server-side integrated with gTalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and others), I download with Free Download Manager and uTorrent, I work on FTP servers with FileZilla Portable.

I use Foxit Reader for PDF documents, I view/edit text files with Notepad2, Notepad++ Portable and I take notes with Dark Room (see also Tools for writing and the way I write). I’m currently evaluating xMind for my mind maps.

I watch videos and movies with Videolan Portable, manage and look my pictures with Fastone, sometimes edit them with GIMP Portable. I listen web radio (check Radio SNJ!!!!) with RadioPlay and my music with CoolPlayer+ Portable.

And, of course, I work with Reflector (can’t not to cite), Snipper Compiler, a lot of stuffs by SysInternals,  SqlDbx, and others.

I’m still waiting (may be dreaming) for VMware Workstation Portable, Visual Studio Portable, Office Portable, Photoshop Portable…

Take a look also here:

• PortableApps.com
• List of portable software on Wikipedia
• Portable software on SoftPedia
• The Portable Freeware Collection

It’s 2 days I’m trying to get Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, a true pain.

Both the two download manager proposed as plug-ins by msdn site (an ActiveX for IE and a Java applet for firefox) don’t work. From two different computers, so is not my problem. I suspect the reason is the web server replying with a 302 HTTP code (temporally moved) to the first request, but I’m not sure.

Ok, I said to my self. It’s time to get a download manager. And I started surfing Softpedia looking for something freeware. The first I tried was VisualVGet. The maximum speed I was able to obtain over 12Mbits DSL line was 5Kb/s. I tried to tweak it a little bit, but nothing happened. Uhm… I need the beta 2 before the final version is released…

Then I remembered of GetRight, I used it a lot in the past. Isn’t free, but the trial period should be enough, I thought. Quickly downloaded and installed. But never been able to use it. The only thing I was able to do was seeing the process getright.exe starting, and shortly terminating. No windows, no alert. No messages in event viewer. A software I will never buy.

Finally, again via Softpedia, I found FDM (Free Download Manager). That is what a program of this kind should be: easy. I learned to use it in about 30 seconds, configured in 15 and, first of all, downloaded Visual Studio in a couple of hour, having the download speed at 350/400 Kb/s, as expected. And… if not clear from the name, it’s free!

I recently discovered a writing tool, and I literally fallen in love with the first time I opened it. Is DarkRoom, a minimal text-only editor that help you concentrate by making the entire screen black leaving only the essentials: words and scrolling arrows (see image).

Then I realized that I really prefer this kind of editors as I write my emails in text-only, I take my notes in Notepad (recently in Notepad2, recommended), I always write “readme documents” in .txt files rather than in Word or other processors.

And this surely influence the way I write, the way I compose sentences, the way I explain concepts, and so on. In a positive way, I think. Because, without colors, without text formatting (bold, italic, font size…), I have only words to express my self clearly, to make readers get the points and catch the concepts I’m writing about.
Further more, I’m not used to have grammar tools helping me. So I often check what I’m writing, and this sometimes drive me to better rewrite a sentence or a period.

I think this good exercise I’ve always done without the intention to getting better in the way I express what I want to say, in the end, really helped me. Specially in English, which is not my first language.

On the other hand, text formatting may be important too for the reader, and sometimes I use it in my posts. Perhaps, the solution may be to apply it only when you finished to compose the text.