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Carry every piece of software you will need on a USB drive. Fungus has been searching. |
You are probably an executive toiling away on a company computer which does not allow you to install your own software. You are not quite clear on why the company has these strict rules. Don’t they know that Internet Explorer is passé? That there are so many freeware applications out there that wouldn’t break any licensing regulations and would make your work just that much easier? Wouldn’t it be convenient to be able to use your favourite applications whenever you wanted? Whether it is the company laptop or a public terminal while you are travelling? If you are plagued by these concerns, allow us to present the solution: Portable Applications.
Portable applications allow you to carry them around on a CD or, more conveniently, a USB memory stick and use them as you would normal applications. There is nothing special to portable applications, actually. The way WindowsTM works is by allowing applications to take advantage of functionality built into shared Dynamic Linked Libraries or DLLs. Sharing these files for basic functionality allows applications to reduce their individual sizes. Portable applications, on the other hand, package all their additional DLLs and, by modifying their CLASSPATH variable, are independent of the WindowsTM registry, thus making them portable.
Our objective this week was simple: To bring you a list of the best portable freeware available on the Net across various categories of software. There are no nominees for each category; simply the winners. Take the time to try them out and we assure you that you’ll be surprised by how much functionality can be stuffed into small, portable, freeware applications. Makes you wonder how Microsoft makes money in the first place.
Office Suites
Portable OpenOffice.org: Far and away the best freeware office suite, now made portable, Portable OpenOffice.org includes Writer(word processor), Calc(spreadsheet), Impress(Presentations), Draw(2D and 3D illustration) and Base(Database). A very feature rich suite now supporting the OpenDocument format, possibly the only shortcoming in the entire suite is the absence of Pivot Tables in Calc.
Web Browser
Portable Opera: The debate may rage long and strong on which of Firefox or Opera is better. Our mind is made up. We may miss a lot of the functionality the extensions provide to FF but to simply browse the Web there is no better experience (faster or cleaner) than Opera. It has always been a small browser and now it is portable.
E-mail Client
Portable Thunderbird: A few memory problems here or there don’t prevent Thunderbird from being the best e-mail client around. And now that it is portable it is absolutely indispensable.
Download Manager
Portable FileZilla: Fast and Easy. That simple.
Instant Messenger
Portable GAIM: Portable Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that works with AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! and more.
Portable Skype: There doesn’t seem to be a stable release anywhere but the way of converting your existing Skype installation to a portable one has been outlined. We just had to mention it.
RSS Reader
Portable RSSOwl: Reads RSS, RDF and Atom news feeds.
Text Editor
Portable Notepad++: The number one editor for text, HTML and various types of code. Use the "install to USB" option when downloading.
PDF Readers
Foxit: Fast and Easy. Like most of the stuff we have presented here.
Multimedia Player
Portable VLC: Capable of not just playing most audio and video formats under the Sun this nifty application can also stream media over a network.
Image Editor
Portable GIMP: One step short of Photoshop and several ahead of most other image editors the GIMP has come a long way.
Antivirus
Portable ClamWin: No on-access scanning or automatic updates but it is always safer to carry your medication with you, isn’t it?
Desktop Publishing
Portable Scribus: A very competent program Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colour, separations, ICC colour management and versatile PDF creation.
Web Editor
Portable Nvu: Nvu is based on the same Gecko engine that powers Firefox and Thunderbird and features an FTP site manager, color picker, tabbed interface, CSS editing, standard-compliant markup, fully customizable interface, a built-in spellchecker and more.
3D Modelling
Blender Pocket: Able to run on Windows™ and PocketPC Blender is a very capable 3D modelling software.
Compression
7-Zip: Handles more formats than you could throw at it and does a good job too.
Audio Editing
Portable Audacity: Audacity remains the standard for audio editing and this is the portable version.
Registry Monitoring
RegMon: Regmon is a Registry monitoring utility that will show you which applications are accessing your Registry, which keys they are accessing, and the Registry data that they are reading and writing - all in real-time.
Hard Disk Monitoring
HDTune: Hard disk information, benchmarking, error-checking and SMART support. What else could you need?
Application Management
PStart: The problem with portable applications is that they, usually, just exist as folders on your USB memory stick and need to be individually searched and launched. PStart lets you organise your portable applications in the same way the Start button lets you control your normal applications.
Games
There is a whole plethora of portable games on the Net. A comprehensive list exists here. There is no clear winner here, obviously.
A lot of effort has gone into portable applications in the recent past. PortableApps.com keeps a consolidated list and packages several of them into flavours of suites which make it easier for you to download a whole bunch of these applications at once. Entire operating systems can be stored on removal storage as ISO images. The above list covers what the Technology team at Hafta uses regularly. We have our favourites, obviously. But our favourites are favourites for a reason. None of these programs were written in jest. These are all serious pieces of code that blow holes in two premises Windows™ works on: One, that bloat is normal and two, that centrally managed code is the way to go.
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