Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere

museumpeace writes "On his blog, Jeremy Wagstaff makes available a list of the apps now packaged for USB thumbdrives. He also wrote these up in WSJ but that will cost you. My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go."

regarding bookmarks...

[jkakar]

I've recently been using http://del.icio.us combined with a live bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar. Now, on the 3 or 4 machines I used regularly I have centralized access to bookmarks. In my case, this turns out to be less hassle than carrying around a thumb drive.

Re:regarding bookmarks...

[christopherfinke]

I've recently been using http://del.icio.us combined with a live bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar.

You might want to try out Chipmark. [chipmark.com] It's a service created at the University of Minnesota similar to del.icio.us, but it's open source, and they provide a Firefox/Mozilla extension [chipmark.com]. It's pretty good, but then again, I might be biased, since I'm part of the development team.

Another great site

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.usbapps.com is a great site for apps you can run on a USB Drive

Thest are great... except - the only problem is...

[guyfromindia]

People dont trust me when I request them to plug my USB key into their computer, to browse the web. For e.g., I was in a Realtor's office the other day, and wanted to print out my bank statement (e-statement). I didnt want to browse using their browser, so, I requested them to accomodate my USB key, so that I can use my secure FireFox to do it. She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!

Re:Portable firefox?

[networkBoy]

RTFA
Does not require booting from USB drive.
-nB

Re:HUGE question about media

[BigZaphod]

VLC comes to mind. I'm pretty sure all the codecs are integrated.

Bookmarks Synchronizer

[fafaforza]

My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go.

I prefer Bookmarks Synchronizer. Upload your bookmarks to an ftp server when closing FireFox if bookmarks changed. Download them when starting it back up and the cpies differ. All automatically.

Security

[Grey_14]

Where I work, they started to disable the USB ports on the computer's, We can still bypass them, but it points out on of the key problems of firefox, It's hard to make it follow a local security policy, my place of employ, uses a local proxy on the machines, to avoid exess traffic which would just be blocked anyway's, because it's used to lock down internet use, (Uses a whitelist of allowable sites), problem is, (Well, to the admins it's a problem that caused them to ban firefox, which makes it a problem for us), Firefox just ignores the local internet connection settings, which say, "Use this proxy", and as far as I know, even if it was installed on the computer's, there's no way to set that, and make it secure.

here you go

[sh0rtie]

no registry or local disk writing, plays Xvid/DivX etc, the only thing is a lack of a decent and small filesize gui, but iam sure that will come in time, works great with autorun.inf and (CD|DVD)Rw?

http://csant.info/mplayer [csant.info]

and

http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/ [nicewarrior.org]

forgot the link

[WankersRevenge]

great for form fields ... http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

This is EXACTLY what my site is all about...

[leftyfb]

http://www.no-install.com/ [no-install.com] I just started this site a couple months ago because I could not find any 1 site out there to get portable applications. So I did a little research myself and thought I put them together in 1 place. Feel free to sign up, post links to downloads and/or articles to related news/software/anything.

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[syukton]

As I just mentioned in another comment [slashdot.org], bureaucracy and its derived words are difficult to spell because their root (Bureau) is derived from French. Another example is hors d'oeuvres, which is often spelled by the layperson as "orderves" because, again, it's French. English, being a mishmash of other languages, invites and welcomes this sort of unpredictable spelling.

Re:Portable firefox?

[Exocet]

While I like having standalone apps that will run off a keychain USB drive, just having small, easily-installed apps available is also a big, big deal for me. It's usually more of a problem of having to download every app I'd like when I'm over at XYZ's and they need ABC123 and it's going to take ages to find it, download it, etc.

http://exocet.ca/phpwiki/BradsTools

Almost all of what's at that wiki I keep on my 256MB USB drive.

PS: I'm tired of paying for WinRAR/WinZip. 7-zip works fine, supports zip, rar, bz2, etc. I don't need fancy options, just be able to open the archive or make an archive.

Re:USB Device I'd like to see..

[mp3phish]

I used to think the same way.. About a year ago USB drives were about twice the price per megabyte over CF and SD cards... Now they are cheaper and more popular. So having this functionality is almost useless...

Still, if you still want this functionality, sandisk makes a very popular SD card reader which is just slightly larger than their cruzer Micro drive [sandisk.com]. It's a little thicker and a littler wider. But honestly this day in age you really are wasting your money to buy a USB drive if you plan on "upgrading" it later on.. as the usb drives are cheaper per megabyte than SD nowadays.

Now... when it comes to mp3 players... upgradeable mp3 players are definately the way to go as far as the near future is concerned... once flash supply can catch up to demand (probably will take another year or so) upgradeable mp3 players won't be such a big issue. But right now the mfg's are charging literally twice as much for twice the flash ram in an mp3 player... Ridiculous when they could just put an SD or CF slot in it and sell the ram for market value, not twice it.

SpyBot

[Lazyhound]

SpyBot S&D [safer-networking.org] runs fine from a thumbdrive, which tends to come in handy.

Ever heard of tinyapps.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not find any 1 site out there to get portable applications

Guess you somehow managed to miss tinyapps.org [tinyapps.org]

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[Badfysh]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn brian deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[babble123]

Given that the spelling error was made by a Canadian, the French origin of the word should be no excuse!

Re:HUGE question about media

[evilviper]

When I move from machine to machine, I usually install the codec packs and then run mplayer off of the USB drive for the media off of it. If there was a media player where I could avoid the hassle of installing the codecs for the media that would be great!

I'll skip the opportunity to complain loudly about so many different media players being named "mplayer"...

What you want is mplayer... (grumble grumble)

http://mplayerhq.hu/ [mplayerhq.hu]

Go to the download section, download the latest MPlayer-win, and also the ~20MB pack of DLLs for Mplayer-win.

Unzip mplayer-win to your USB drive, then unzip the DLLs into the codecs folder. Then I would recomend copying arial.ttf to the mplayer folder as well (for any text subs/OSD text). To change the defaults, you can edit mplayer.conf. Then, to make life oh-so-much easier, you will want to download one of the dozens of GUI front-ends for mplayer-win.

Now you have a media player that can play nearly any video/audio codec available, is far faster than any other player, can encode from any codec to MPEG1/2/4, SVQ1/3, NUV, H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), etc., can output VCD/SVCD/DVD-compliant files (ready for vcdimager/dvdauthor) can capture nearly any streams to disk (RM, ASX, QT, RTP, RTSP, MMS, etc), can rip VCDs/SVCDs/DVDs to disk, can be used for editing, and does much more that doesn't immediately come to mind.

I'm just mentioning the Windows version, because that's surely what most people are looking for, but MPlayer binaries for OS X, Linux, and every other flavor of Unix are available as well, and could all be together on a single USB drive, so you'd be ready when only a Mac or Solaris machine is available...

For video playback, about the only (minor) problem is that mplayer doesn't have any support for DVD menus, so you have to manually select which title to play. Besides that, it's the best media player on any platform.