Recently discovered there are interesting new entries within my loved portable apps:
- Skype, never thought it could ever go portable.
- TeamViewer, one of my favorite collaboration and remote support tools. Really powerful, give it a try.
- 2X Client, RDP remote client with interesting features.
- 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.
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:
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!
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