Applications on the go…..

As the prices of flash drive storage have dropped to bargain levels, the feasibility of taking multi gigabytes of data and software in your pocket has become extremely attractive. Being someone who likes to customize their computer environments with specific applications, the thought of being able to make that environment mobile and useable from any computer terminal is kind of cool. In looking around for tools that I can run off of my $50 64GB flash drive, I settled in on a toolset called Portable Apps.

Portable Apps, is an application that installs to any flash drive and acts a launcher for lightweight versions of many of the most commonly used utilities in general computer work. Installation of the Portable Apps program is very straight forward. Download it from www.portableapps.com, run the installer, and follow the default prompts. The only tricky part, if any, is to make sure you target your flash drive as the destination.  Once the installation is complete, the next step is to launch one of the preinstalled applications or download additional ones for installation. Depending on the the version you downloaded, the preinstalled applications will vary. The versions can range from the minimalistic base installation with no preinstalled applications to the full version with all supported applications ready to go. To get an idea as to the different installation editions and the applications that come bundled, refer to the information below. (Click on the image for an expanded view.)

I have personally grown to enjoy this utility for make my office a bit more mobile. The tools like Pidgin for instant messaging, Filezilla for FTP, and Thunderbird for email, have been great to run on terminals when I am on the road. Having a flash drive with both my data and my applications available at any time on any computer, make being a road warrior a bit more livable.