Portable Applications

http://www.memecode.com/iftp.php

iFTP is a nice little ftp program. It’s small and doesn’t need to be “installed” so it can just run from its own directory. The configuration files are in its directory too, so you can download it to a thumbdrive or your harddrive, configure it, and then burn that directory to a cd.

Personally, I like having as much as I can on cd, because cd’s are cheap and have a good amount of storage. If you loose one, or damage one it’s easy to replace, and I think it looks less suspicious than a thumbdrive.

iFTP is pretty standard for an ftp program. There may be better ones out there, but for a portable app, this is a good one to have.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/6763/html/dwhtml.html

DwHTML is a tiny html editor that I’ve been using for a long time. It’s a little more useful than notepad, but that’s about it. It dates back to a time when web pages were simpler and people were proud to have written their web sites completely with notepad.

By todays standards, it’s a crappy little html editor, but it’s tiny, portable and helps you remember all those html tags, so I keep it around. It also comes in handy if you edit files written on unix or linux machines as it displays the text correctly.
dwhtml is hard to find, but it’s still floating around out there.

http://www.muukka.net/multidesktop/

This one is pretty cool, and I used to use it a lot, but haven’t run it in quite a while.

If you’ve ever run linux, you probably have seen a desktop manager with multiple virtual desktops. You can switch between these desktops and have different programs running on them. This way, your screen does not get cluttered and you can group programs together in logical ways.

Multiple Desktop Manager lets you have multiple desktops on your windows 2k and above machine. You switch between them with ctrl-alt-(right or left arrow button).

I like to have a desktop will all my “work” applications nicely laid out and looking professional and one with the unofficial apps I bring with me to work.

Cygwin is a unix/linux like environment for windows. You can go to the cygwin site and use their installer to get a custom environment, or you can just do what I did and get user.exe from this site about unix win32 utilities.Install the program and then edit the batch file or cmd file so it will work when you burn the directory to a cd. You’ll just have to change the paths in the file so that it will reflect the drive where it will reside.

I use linux at home, so I like having the bash shell because of its great programing capabilities. If you have linux/unix/bash skills, cygwin is a great thing to have.

www.irfanview.com

IrfanView is a portable graphics application. It’s not as powerful as the Gimp, but it’s smaller and faster. It will let you view all sorts of image formats, and do basic things like cropping.

IrfanView may need to be installed on a machine, but then you can just copy the installation directory to a cd and it’s good to go.

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

Gimp, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, is an image manipulation program common to linux/unix. Gimp is very powerful and similar to photoshop, but it’s free software.

Gimp requires gtk+ for windows and the two packages can be combined to make one portable distribution. Here are the steps as discovered by Kerm Martian: Read more…

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderbird/

Portable Thunderbird is a great email client that fits on a thumbdrive. It lets you check all your email accounts from work without leaving configuration info or passwords on your computer. You can set it up to keep mail on the server, so it won’t interfere with your other email programs, or you can use it at home too.

The only caveat is that the spam filters (which work great!) should not be used on a thumbdrive, because they cause too many read/write operations which will shorten the life of your thumbdrive.

www.7-zip.org

7-zip is in my humble opinion, the best free compression utility for windows. It won’t require registration like winzip, and its own file compression format is more compressed than zip files.

7-zip will run from it’s own directory, so it needs no “installation”. Just download it and burn the directory to a cd. There is a command line version as well as a gui. The gui version you will use will be either 7zFM.exe or 7zFMn.exe. FM stands for file manager and the “n” is for NT, so if you run windowsNT, 2k, or XP use 7zFMn.exe

7-zip is free and portable, so I have it on my workCD and I never have to worry about opening compressed files.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/

Firefox is a pretty great browser. It features tabbed browsing (very nice) and all the features you’d expect from a modern browser. The best thing about having a portable browser is that you can save bookmarks, history, passwords, and usernames without leaving any of it on your computer at work.

Firefox works best on a thumbdrive which allows you to save data, but there is a work-around to use it on a cd.

www.autohotkey.com

Autohotkey is the single greatest application I’ve ever found to take to work. It lets me automate all sorts of repetitive things and even create my own little programs and tools for use at work. I don’t ever like to work without it.

I discovered autohotkey when I had an extremely boring job checking remedy tickets for the NMCI project. I had used a macro recording utility that I got from a windows software development kit long ago, and found that it was useful for automating repetitive keystrokes and the like. I went out looking for something like that to use at work to make life a little easier for me. Read more…