Portable Apps Lifestyle?
So every site out there has their own list… the ‘32 Useful Portable Apps For Web Designers and Developers’, or the ‘10 Must Have Portable Applications’, and they have some awesome tools, etc. Therefore my intention is not to give you lists. I have been using Portble Apps for nearly a year now and they have basically changed the way I live and operate simply by integrating portable apps into my lifestyle. Don’t ever change your life to fit with IT, make IT work for you! 
Firstly, go straight to www.portableapps.com and download their latest suite.. but only download the ‘Platform Only’ version. You seriously don’t need all the default applications that they have in their bundles. You could even be brave and try out their Version 2 beta 3… I did and some of the new feature are awesome and totally needed, like the ability to hide apps from your app list.
Secondly, whilst surfing portableapps.com go to their applications section and download a few apps that you might need.
Moving on from here…. here is a list of the apps I currently have on my 16gb portable apps specific usb disk.
Mozilla Thunderbird
You cannot go wrong having your email with you where ever you go. I check 3 different email addresses at the same time via Thunderbird. My secret though, if you are like me and have a desktop machine at home… this is your portable email so whilst setting up your email account make sure to leave the option ticked to leave the messages on the server. You can always empty your email server from your desktop machine. My desktop machine however is set to only delete messages after 7days from the server… therefore I will always receive all the mail to both my Portable Apps and my Desktop Machine.
Mozilla Firefox
Straight up for surfing the web. I love firefox its my browser of choice and with the Xmarks Addon installed I never need to concern myself with having different bookmarks stored in different versions of Firefox… Xmarks keeps that all neatly organised for me.
Portable Digsby
Yes I know… technically a portable version does not exist.. however ‘Carsten Knobloch’ has written a version that works perfectly with the PortableApps platfom and even downloads the latest Digsby updates. Instant Messaging on a portable device has never been easier, allowing me to connect to gmail, msn, facebook and twitter. Portable Digsby’s only draw back is that it does not store your message history.
FileZilla
I host and manage quiet a few websites in my spare time for friends, so having a portable FTP client with all the FTP account details stored within it is great. I actually don’t use a none portable version of filezilla because this version runs fine everywhere and has all the details stored in it already.
Opera Portable
What? Do I hear you asking… why do I have Opera when I have Firefox and have already said I love firefox… well basically… firefox for my cellphone has not come of age yet, and therefore I still use Opera Mini on my phone. Opera has a built in ’synchronise’ feature similar to that of Xmarks and therefore I use Opera to manage my bookmarks coming from my cellphone browsing. My next goal is to merge my Opera Browsing with Xmarks, or to even dump Opera Mini on my phone. Time will tell which I follow through with, but for now its a simple matter of exporting the Opera Books Marks as .html and importing them into Firefox.
Skype Portable
Yup… sadly Digsby does not yet support skype… but until it does Skype Portable works just fine logging me into my skype account.
WinWGet
Its a basic Download Manager that lets me surf at local coffee shops or via my cellphone but then to simply cue up lager files for download and then download them on my fast line at the office.
Nedbank Money Manager
Yup… being a Nedbank Client! I simply installed their Money Manager software to my USB disc. I don’t think it was intended to be Portable but it is and its a great little tool. Using the new PortableApps Version 2 made the world of difference with the Money Manager because it allowed me to hide so many of its annoying extra .exe files that showed up in Portable Apps.
So What Else?!
I also have a few other apps installed, but honesty they don’t get used often.. Lurking on my disc I also have :-
- ClamWin – Antivirus
- HP41C Calculator Emulator – Its an old school reverse polish notation calculator
- JkDefrag – Never know, Defragging could come in handy
- Mozilla Sunbird – Haven’t found a use for this yet..
- Notepad++ – I love Notepad++ its a great tool and I use this when editing CSS code for my websites.
- Toucan Backup – A simple backup / mirror application, its great if you want to keep a portable copy of a folder synchronised with your Desktop Machine
- WinDirStat – Its a cool way to visualise data storage use on your USB Disc
Portable Apps are changing the way we compute… and I am totally going along for the ride, because I consider them to be the medium step in computing.. that’s because the big step is complete portable operating systems and netbooks.
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