Does anybody have slick way of tracking automatically the versions of all their portable apps?
I'm starting to be concerned that with multiple USB keys (my wife and I for now) that I'm not going to easily know what needs to be updated. I'm planning that I'll get her key once a month-ish and run all the updates. Other than a document with all the info, or opening each one individually, does anyone have a better way of keeping the apps updated?
I'm thinking that I love a built in function in PAM that tracks whenever PAM installs something, but then there's have to be a way to update it for non-PAM apps.
Anyways, any ideas are much appreciated.
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that something like this will be introduced with the next version of the menu.
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If only there was a Trackerdog server and client for PCs like there is for Palm OS.
Keeping all the apps on my Treo smart phone up-to-date is a doddle with TrackerDog.
For any that don't know, when a hotsync is done the client in the PC goes on the net to Trackerdog's server and gets the version #s of the apps that are in the Palm and then sends them to the Palm. At the end of the hotsysnc you have a list of your apps with the loaded version # and the latest version #. You can easily see which need updating.
I've wondered if something like this could be developped for PCs
Thats something I'd love to see for ALL windows apps.
Having just read the thread further up this page about the RealVNC vulnerability surely there has to merit in "someone" building some sort of server/client framework where versions and vulnerabilities/alerts could be stored.
I suppose there would be some hefty bandwidth requirements, and the security around accepting new versions/alerts would have to be pretty tight too.
Portable Apps by nature aren't "installed", so where are you going to get the version info from? You can't query WMI or the registry to get the info.
If every portable app had an XML file in it's root dir with the version info in it, then you'd have something to work with.
Thinking out loud here...
You could have a little exe or script file iterate through all the portable app root dirs looking for XML files gathering the installed version info then query an online server for the RSS feed or WSDL service for the latest versions available. The exe/script would compare versions and then flag the user somehow that a new version was available and a link to get it.
(All the XML files could be in common directory, but that would defeat the purpose of portable apps being self-contained IMHO.)
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In every newer App released by John here, there is a /App/appdata folder woth an icon and an ini file.
I think they are both for the menu and to provide various infos.
"There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!" - Richard Feynman
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Is usually included in the actual exe file by the creator; you can see it if you look at the "Properties" for the main executable.
I haven't tried using WMI or VB scripts to query for this, but a lot of locked-down public computers should block these scripts.
It would be interesting if someone was able to write an exe that can pull the version info from each exe file automatically.
The version info is also included in the App\AppInfo\appinfo.ini files for John's apps, so theoretically he could make PAM display it. But, almost all of us use non-JTH apps also, so they would be left out of that party.
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