Portable Apps

I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish.

PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top).

Platforms

• Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse.
• Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows.
• Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows.

Tiny utilities

• GDI++ replaces the Windows font engine with a Mac-line rendering. Looks cool.
• Clip is a command line tool that copies to clipboard. “dir | clip” copies the file listing to the clipboard. Outrageously useful.
• PicPick takes screenshots of the screen, windows, regions, whatever. And you can edit them too.
• uTorrent downloads torrents.
• WinDiff compares two files and tells you the difference.
• AlwaysOnTopMaker makes any window stay on top of other windows.
• DiskTT tells you your hard disk (or USB stick) speed.
• WinHTTrack downloads websites.
• AllChars lets you type special characters like ½ by type Alt-1-2 or “ by Alt-`-`. It’s shockingly intuitive.
• Restoration lets you undelete permanently deleted files.
• Windirstat tells you what’s taking up space on your disk.
• Sysinternals is a bunch of system monitoring utilities.
• Virtual CD-ROM mounts .ISO files. You can use .ISO files without burning them.
• Autostitch stitches together photos to create panoramas.

Media

• VLC plays any audio or video file.
• TightVNC lets you log into other machines like a remote desktop./li>
• Audacity lets you record and edit audio.
• CamStudio lets you record video (screen capture).
• VirtualDub lets you edit video.
• MediaCoder converts audio and video from any format to another.
• GIMP is like Photoshop. You can edit pictures.
• Inkscape lets you edit vector graphics.

Servers

• XAMPP installs Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl at one shot.
• App Engine is Google’s freemium platform for app hosting.
• Persevere is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Java.
• Tomcat is a JSP server.
• nginx is a fast web server
• CouchDB is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Erlang.

Development tools

• Notepad++ is my current text editor. It has syntax highlighting, column editing, Unicode support, auto-completion, and is fast and free. So I dumped Crimson Editor.
• Putty is SSH for Windows.
• Tidy cleans up HTML files.
• CSSTidy cleans up CSS files.
• Processing is a graphical programming language.
• Wireshark monitors network traffic.
• Drip checks IE for leaks.
• NVDA is a free screen reader.

Let me repeat:

1. You don’t need admin rights to install these.
2. You can run them off a USB stick.
3. They won’t make your machine slower.

There’s really no reason whatsoever not to have them on a USB stick at least. They’re cheap.