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When I lost my 8 GB flash drive a couple of weeks ago, my digital life was over. With no working computer at home, my browser, games, homework, college essays, music, videos, and some projects I was working on were gone--nor could I do anything about it either. I had deleted my old backup data on my 2 GB so I could keep a copy of the original StarCraft on it after my laptop broke a while back. I was on the last mission of the Zerg in the expansion, when I realized my laptop wouldn't make it--I still got to finish that up some time.

There are many communities out there dedicated to software portablization. By joining one of them, you can:

• get assistance on portablizing applications;
• help other developers and users of portable applications;
• offer your application for testing before publishing it in the wild.

Each community usually has its own standard and guidelines for portable applications, as well as specific ways to achieve portability. This guide will focus on PortableApps.com, the site I am member of. You are free to choose any other, but you will need to adapt or ignore many parts of the rest of the guide.

Introduction

Have you ever wanted to take your favorite applications, as well as their settings, and be able to use them on any computer? Have you ever wanted to be able to reinstall Windows without having to reinstall and reconfigure all your programs? Have you ever wanted to demonstrate a new app to a friend without installing it first?

If you have answered "yes" to any of the previous questions, then you are looking for portable applications. They do not depend on the computer they are running on, and can be easily shared with anyone. They are your computer on any computer.

Do you have an application you want to make portable? We'll see how to do it. But first, there are a few things we have to learn, like the full definition of portable application.

I stumbled across this article about IObit Cloud, an alternative to other sites like VirusTotal, talking about how it works and the guys perspective on it.

I tried it out, uploading FirefoxPortable.exe and Halo SightJacker (SightJacker.exe), which is not a virus, but Sophos has been freaking out over it lately for very suspicious behavior (it lets you spy on other players in Halo to see if they use bots).

Here are the results:

I am currently working on a series of posts about the development cycle of a portable app. This guide will cover all major aspects of portable apps: since the definition of "portable app" (and a bit of history), licensing issues, trace detection and analysis, until the official release.
I hope to be able to post within a 1 week/month interval. Meanwhile, drafts can be found at my website.

In the PortableApps.com Format Specification, there is the requirement that the PackageVersion in appinfo.ini is identical to the base app's Package Version. This is as it should be. Accordingly, the DisplayVersion of an app, when officially released, should match as well.

The PortableApps.com Launcher 2.1 has been released! Somehow it managed to take ten and a half months after 2.0 before 2.1 was released (five and a half since Beta 2), but it's finally here. Now on to 2.2.

I would again like to remind developers of two things for using PAL 2.1:

• Use the new support for directory moving.

Judging from how often users request custom shells (SharpEnviro, bbLean, and LiteStep are just a few of the requests/test builds I've seen), this is something people really want. And now, I'm pretty sure it's here.