Blogs

howdy all,

Just want y'all to know that I am going to be working on more releases of apps to come like NSISPortable and another release of DVDStylerPortable too. For DVDStylerPortable, I finally got around to fixing a small empty folder left behind in the appdata folder. NSISPortable is a project I took on from the other Zach on the team with the surname of Hudock. This is going to pre-release as soon as I package it up.

I've personally wanted to have the launcher and installer source code on Subversion for a *long* time, it makes things so much easier.

So, I figured, I'd put my money (what little I have) where my mouth is, and as of today, both WinMerge Portable's source and Songbird Portable's source are available from http://padp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

I'm not intending to include the original app's binaries on SVN, as SVN is no place for binaries. I've made one exception to this rule: sqlite3.exe is available with Songbird Portable as it's so small, and it's not part of Songbird itself.

Just to let you know Toucan hit 2 milestones last week! The first was the release of Toucan 2.0.4 one week ago (January 15), the tenth release of Toucan. Also on Saturday (January 17) Toucan hit 500,000 downloads.

Thanks to everyone for their support in making this happen!

Here's the goodies. As always, there's a nice help.html stuffed in there that will tell you all you need to know.

http://www.simplexitynetwork.com/mr.soup12/downloads/IntelliLaunch.exe

This is my first blog post, but I need some help. How to you created Menus? Not tray menus but one that would be displayed under the title block? If you are familiar with ahk and know of a solution or can point me in the direction of it, I would really appreciate it. If you haven't already downloaded my application you can find it here.... https://portableapps.com/node/17451 any feedback, bug reports, or help with development would greatly help me.

I have a new screenshot of xenon.

FYI that's Xubuntu. If someone who knows why the address bar isn't visible I could use some help with it. The source code requires no modifications to compile properly.

Anyway it would be nice to get linux support working properly.

Well I have just posted a patch to the wxWidgets Trac system, as far as I know the first time that PortableApps.com has submitted a patch to an upstream project, and long may it continue! If you are interested the patch is here and it implements the setting of directory timestamps on Windows. Nothing fancy, but hopefully a solid start for PortableApps.com helping other projects.

So I have been thinking recently about how to deal with Toucan development in the future, specifically with regards to when to release new versions. Currently there is quite a long time between releases, which is fine if you aren’t affected by any bugs and are just looking forward to new features, but is a nuisance if you are affected by a bug. In the table below you can see the time between releases of Toucan so far:

As you may have noticed, we get a lot of talk from users here on PortableApps.com wondering why they get this box popping up when they plug their USB drives into the computer. The users simply expect the menu to come up without having to do anything else. As they say, if U3 can do it, why can't we?

The reason behind autorun being disabled is an extremely valid one: security. Some users argue that simply autorunning a piece of software can't do anything bad to their system. Well, let's take a look at a type of virus that has been around for quite a while: the boot sector virus.

And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which [...] it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis.