My favourite Portable Apps

Sometimes you love a program so much you just have to take it with you. Thank goodness for Portable Apps. Now you can run many of your favourite apps right off of your USB stick. Here are some of my favourites:

• Thunderbird Portable/Gmail Combo - 10 bananas

  
  Gmail is fantastic. More space than you'll ever need. Great interface. Best of all its portable - you can get your mail from any computer with an internet connection. But there is something great about having a smart mail client.
  Using Thunderbird Portable you can store your mail on your flash drive for retrieval at any time - whether or not you can get to an internet connection. Plus you get a great portable mail client from the guys that brought you Firefox.
  Here's how you set it up...
  
  
  
  • Get a Gmail account (or any other web account that supports POP3 download).
  
  
  • Go to the Forwarding and POP tab under the Settings page and enable POP Download.
  
  
  • Set up Thunderbird Portable with your Gmail account with the settings found here.
  
  
  • Smile at your achievement.
  
  
  • Take your email anywhere.
    

  Tip from the Smoothie:
  

  This combo can make a great present for someone who doesn't have their own email address.
  Buy a USB stick.
  Get a Gmail address for the presentee.
  Set it up.
  Deliver the present.
  Collect 10 smoothie points.
  



• GIMP Portable - 8 bananas

  
  GIMP is an image editing program - a free alternative to Photoshop, Corel Draw etc. I often have to edit icons, GIFs and simple pictures at work and MS paint just doesn't cut it. All graphics on this site have been done with GIMP and I would say that 90% of it was done with GIMP Portable.



• Mozilla Firefox Portable - 7 bananas

  
  I'm afraid its come to a point where I can no longer tolerate having to use Internet Exploiter. Now I can take the 'fox with me no matter where I go. Granted - most of the computers I use already have Firefox installed, so I don't really get to use it much(hence the rating). Get it here.



• SciTE - Scientilla Text Editor - 7 bananas

  
  Great text editor with syntax highlighting, folding and other arb features that only a software developer could love. Really, it is just a text editor after all. I use SciTE extensively for editing HTML, XML and especially web.config files on remote servers. If you can handle using Notepad, then you're a better man than me.



• XAMPP - 6 nerd bananas

  
  A complete Apache/MySQL/Php/Perl development server that you can carry with you. Easy setup - just copy the folder to your USB and go.



• VLC - Video Lan Client - 8 bananas

  
  VLC is my favourite media player anyway. I hardly ever find a video file it can't play. Ok, maybe I could try harder but even if there was some hypothetical file that it couldn't, it still plays better than Media Player and Real player. The portable version is here.

Setting Up The Arsenal

Make sure you get a program to launch your portables. I use PStart, but the Portable Apps Suite has a great little launcher of its own. Oh yes ... I also usually keep all my apps in one folder so that they don't fight with my other documents on my USB. Portable Apps are mean, I once saw some having a bucketOf.tar eating contest.

More

PortableApps.com
Wikipedia List of Portable Apps