PortableApps.com Platform 2.0 (Leo) Beta 5 Testing

I just tried updating via Manage Apps -> Update Apps and Java Portable was not included even though uTorrent and VLC were. Is this intentional?

I don't know if this is known or not, but whenever I run this in WINE, I end up getting a segmentation fault.

wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x0000:0x00000000 (thread 0009), starting debugger...

Probably will be fixed in a future version, but I just wanted to point it out.

Tested on Wine under KDE 4 on Debian Sid.

Debian Wine package version: 1.0.1-3

#wine --version
wine-1.0.1-2-5-g4412ca7

Portableapps starts correctly and looks mostly normal, although application icons are on a dark background, and the portableapps system tray icon is on a grey background. (Transparency problem?)

Application launching works, but I did not test all apps for compatibility. PA applications open and close noticeably quicker under WINE than they do on Windows Vista.

When menu is active, switching to another application causes the menu to come back to the foreground before disappearing (KDE's own Network manage applet does the same thing, so this is not a portableapps issue. It is a lot more noticeable with PA, however).

Scrolling the menu works, but is slow. Mouseover effects on the menu work normally.

"Search this drive" and "Search this computer" do nothing. "Search the Web" launches Firefox (Windows version from PA).

"Documents", "Explore", etc do not respond to mouse clicks.

Backup works. Did not test restore. Backup indicates that "The details window is shown. Closing it will abort the Process", but there is no details window. I would like to see a details window as the progress sits at close to 100% for a very long time with no feedback other than the flashing light on the USB drive.

"Check for Updates" correctly found and installed updates for Firefox and 7Zip.

"Install a new App" works correctly.

Changing themes works.

Help works, launching Firefox for Windows at the appropriate URL.

The eject button closes PA, but does not unmount the drive.

Conclusion: The critical functions of PA (Showing the menu, launching apps, installing and upgrading apps) work well on my setup. All issues above are minor, or cosmetic, or do not affect core functionality.

I use a lot of apps on my PA enabled drive. One of them, Keepass, wants to continually update to v1.17, but I am using 2.12 instead.

Is there any possibility that the Updater will allow us to permanently disable updates for particular applications?

A really basic coloured theme that works better for very slow remote desktop\VNC sessions would be a nice feature to have.

I already noted it in the release note, but it failed to find the upgrade for Firefox 4.0 beta (from beta 1 to beta 2), around 20 hours after the release note.

Just FYI... I upgraded manually this time, in case there's an issue with "Test versions" with the updater.

Dit post has been moved!

[Moved back, please don't create a separate thread for something that doesn't really need saying anyway as others have said it; mod Chris]

Some necessary advise/comments about the next release: IT WILL BE A AILABLE WHEN IT IS READY and not a moment sooner!

So even if there was some indication that the final would be ready at end of juli, forget it, from experience we all know that release expectations are always postponed.

From the above I personally believe dat de next available beta will be somewhere next SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, and the Final Release somewhere before the END OF THIS YEAR (if... Everything goes well)

So just be patient!

If you use the wallpaper switching feature, after closing the Suite the wallpaper still changed, this feature worked fine in older versions (Beta 4, Beta 3, etc.). This issue was experienced in Windows 7 (I've not tested other OS)

how do you make your own themes?

I have had no problems with this at all. Isn't that nice for a beta?

The only thing I really do not like is the "Check for Updates" feature.
I find myself clicking on it at least 2 or three times a day, and it has worked perfectly.

Ok, I really do like this feature... but I am a bit compulsive about it.
I am almost 59 years old, and like Google, I think I am still a beta.

Love the platform. Love the beta of the new version. It really replaces my old ThinkPad that gave up the ghost about six months ago.

Dana

John T. Haller, Could you put on the PortableApps.com Platform a custom desktop?
For example, when you started the platform, it would open a custom desktop, changing temporary the current desktop, which its files would be save into a PortableApps.com folder. And you had the option of activating and deactivating it, on PortableApps.com Menu.
Thanks.

Hi,

I use PA for my personal stuff when I'm in work (dummy terminals) but am behind a proxy server, so get 403 forbidden when I use updater.

Any plans to add proxy support?

Thanks - p.s. I love this release!

The updater keeps telling me that there is an update for the AppCompactor to version 2.0.1 no matter how many times I install the update.

In the Advanced Options window I think it would be good to have an option to automatically remove 'Portable' from the end of all app names. Maybe on a tweaks tab?

Probably wouldn't be easy to implement for development tests but for official apps?

PA.c updater crashes everything in the PA.c menu.:sad: had to reinstall everything to make them work again. Please fix this.

Hello,

first of all I want to thank all the developers for the wonderful work you are doing here.

I have downloaded the Beta5 and I wanted to take a look at the file associations options as shown in a preview picture. Unluckily, I cant find that options. Am I just stupid to find it or isnt it integrated yet? How do I set the file associations? Many thanks for any help.

AII

Tested the updater on my 32bit Windows XP laptop, while running from a custom folder on the desktop.

Worked just fine! No problems found! Sometimes, I wonder if we are really "beta" testing. I mean, most of the bugs are ironed out by the time you released this to the forums!

Hi John, the new version is looking good so far.

Still no option or ini file way to change the locations of the Documents, Music, etc folders, though? Hate having to use the old and outdated code forks.

I know the theming is not entirely solid, but I've been playing with it and am pretty psyched about being able to layer png files and use html colors.
I've created some custom themes where I don't use the Chrome files, and put all the design work into the background.png. The chrome files are great if all you want to do is change the color, but they need to be hidden for original designs.
In the patheme.ini file, I set Chrome=none.
It works fine, except that when you install the theme, it always shows the white.png Chrome file overlaid on the menu.
If you close and reopen the menu, it's fine, the Chrome file is not shown, and you can see the unimpeded background.png.

It's only a minor PIA, since it only happens when you install the theme. But if you can get it to read and display what's in the ini file at the time of install, that would be good.

Or, you could add a transparent chrome file, call it transparent.png, and then you would be able to select it correctly in the ini file.

Thanks!

EDIT: I just answered my own question. If you set the Chrome=custom, it works perfectly. You can delete this post if you'd like.

EDIT EDIT: But it would be nice if users could create their own custom Chrome files.

I thought we were supposed to be getting a new Beta "...every couple of weeks..."! It's been a month since the last one. What news?

I accidently mounted my IronKey drive read-only. I had to kill PA with the task manager, because it wouldn't quit without updating some files. IMHO PA should
detect at launch whether the drive is read-only and do the right thing.

It works just fine. Thanks for another great release.
Keep on going!

I hope so. It's been well over a month since the last beta release.

This is looking realy good! I mean extremely good like Chuck Noris just shook your hand and you DIDN'T explode kinda good! I know that a theme switcher is already being implemented, but I have recently released a beta of my new program, "PortableAppsThemes" I know that since you have already decided on intergrateing a theme system into your program, maybe you could have a look. It's in DoS code, so I don't know what good it'll do you, but whatever. Also, the new menu layout is impressive. It destroys the old layout, and change is good! I have download the beta and I am planning to skin the new themes provided in the Beta, with full credit and support for the current stable version of PA.c. for anyone who is interested. I'll put the link up, and I guess I'll finish up my project so that it'll work untill the new menu is finished. I have already put up a skin website, so I guess that's that. CAN'T WAIT FOR THE BETA TO BE FINISHED!!!

[Language purified by mod Chris - please do not repeat that.]

I had not seen this mentioned yet and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced it.

Platform 2.0 Beta 5 (Leo) on Windows XP computer. When I first grabbed it about a month ago, I ran the update with no problems from my work computer. Proxy and everything ran fine.

However, since that first run, the Updater has not been able to update anything. Thus far that would be:
Firefox 3
Firefox 4
GIMP
Chrome
Inkscape
VLC
Toucan
Notepad ++

There's probably a few others.

Planned Troubleshooting:
1. Reinstall platform over the top of current install and running update.
2. Reinstall platform fresh (delete old version); same.

Any one else see this or have any suggestions for troubleshooting?

In the shift to Unicode, it seems almost all of my list of locale corrections from 2.0 Beta 4 were lost. At least Vietnamese was fixed

• Luxembourgish does not have a locale ID assigned by Microsoft. Its LocaleID should probably be changed from 1033 (English) to 9999 (like Sundanese). (There are "French - Luxembourg" and "German - Luxembourg" in Microsoft's list, but I believe this "Luxembourgish" to be quite separate from both of these from a brief look in the files.)
• Belarussian is a misspelling of Belarusian and should be renamed to that (including the LocaleWinName).
• Farsi has a LocaleCode3 of "per/fas" which should be cut down to just "fas".
• Sundanese has an invalid double line break in its last string (Vietnamese has been fixed!).
• Simplified Chinese has a LocaleID 936 which is actually its codepage (and not even that is significant any more with Unicode); it should be 2052.
• Filipino has its LanguageCode, LocaleCode2 and Localeglibc all set to "fil" where they should all be "tl".

Now there are three more changes to make.

• SerbianLatin's LocaleWinName should be LANG_SERBIANLATIN, not LANG_SERBIAN.
• Serbian should have a LocaleID of 3098 (Cyrillic) instead of 2074 (Latin). Also its LanguageCode, LocaleCode2 and LocaleCode3 are in Cyrillic rather than Latin characters (looked like cp to me, I didn't notice at first that it was actually ср, it was only when I thought to myself that the n in срп looked funny that I twigged). The same values as SerbianLatin, (sr, sr and srp) are what it should be (the ISO-639 tables don't split Serbian between Latin and Cyrillic alphabets).
• Galician: LocaleID should be 1110, not 3082 which is SpanishInternational's (this is a regression, not sure how it happened)

I also observe that LocaleName didn't get into Beta 5 after all. Just a reminder for when it does go in that it's the filename except for PortugueseBrazilian which is PortugueseBR, ChineseSimplified which is SimpChinese and ChineseTraditional which is TradChinese. (I have it noted in a comment in the PAL manual source but not in a thread here ever.)

(Before I could produce this report I had to get my table-generating script to work with the Unicode files. Not as easy as it might have been - like most things, Python doesn't support UTF-16LE very well. UTF-8 is so much better.)

Thanks

Edit: more problems with Serbian added to the list

I was downloading and installing mulitple app updates and got an insufficient space message. The installer continued to try and plow thru the rest of the installations. The Cancel was not enabled to stop it.

On another note, it would be nice to have the select all, deselect all and reverse selection buttons on the application list of the updater.

Hello! Good day.

First off... THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for the Updater!!

Second, I have a few questions/suggestions that I will respectfully submit. (Please say what you think.)

A. Is it possible to have extra large fonts? Or a way to set the font size of the PA menu manually?? (I was trying to use the Magnifying Glass app to see if that would work, but I wasn't successful.)

B. About the PA Updater, my suggestion is for the part about Get[ting] More Apps. Is it possible to have the PA Updater present users with a list where they can simply check off what they want installed (& the Updater downloads & installs it automatically)?

The list could be just of available programs, or it could have extremely short descriptions you can see with a mouse over. The descriptions will, of course, be much shorter than what's on the page to which Get More Apps links. For example, Open Office could be productivity suite (or something like that), so it gives users an idea of what it is, if they don't already know.

My reason for this tweak, if it is possible & not too much of a headache to do, is that it might make reinstallation easier, if something happens to the drive (e.g. virus, unrecognizable, etc.). (Perhaps, the backup function takes care of this already; I'm not sure.)

Installation might also be easier, instead of going to each page, clicking download, waiting for the Sourceforge page, & then okaying the install. It was very time-consuming, even on broadband (but mine is low speed) & I was just wondering, if there were a way to reduce that.

C. Also, is it possible to develop a way to install all the apps you want at one time? Or that you can set it to install one app at a time?

D. Will PA eventually just offer the Platform by itself (especially if my suggestion from be is implementable)? OR offer a way to update components/apps in the suite so that outdated apps are not downloaded?

Something like this, if it is doable/practical, may save bandwidth.

My question about the different suites is: Why offer them when they may already contain outdated apps? (particularly for users who didn't download the suite when it was just released)

Those are just a few thoughts. I hope they are food for thought and that I am not being redundant.

--Kei

P.S. I IN NO WAY mean to sound negative in my post or for it to appear that I am tearing down anyone's work in any way. (I am not a tech person, so I'm not throwing stones. )

I had a thought the other day about how the updater could be made to support 3rd-party apps in such a way that it would be totally self-contained to the app itself, allowing developers to provide their own updates without having to be added to the updater's database. Basically it would just involve adding a new line in the AppInfo.ini pointing to a URL which contains the update info for just that app (it could be a simple .ini file containing the latest version number and the direct download URL or whatever format you currently use for the update database. So basically, if that line in AppInfo.ini isn't present, the updater just tries to update that app using the default database, but if there IS a URL provided, the updater downloads that .ini and parses it to determine if there is an update to that app or not, and gets the download link. That way, 3rd-party developers can host their own update data, and update it themselves without going through you to add the update to the updater database. I'm kind of tired at the moment and may have explained this poorly, or redundantly, I don't know, but basically something like this:

AppInfo.ini

[Version]
PackageVersion=
DisplayVersion=
UpdateURL=http:\\product.website\update.ini

update.ini

[AppIDCodeGoesHere]
CurrentVersion=
DownloadURL=

That way the entire update process could be entirely controlled by the developers without any intervention from you. Just a thought. Also, if you already have something like this in the works (like you have with pretty much all of my other awesome ideas...) then great

PS Perfect timing getting the updater out this summer. My sister headed off to college this past month with no computer and last Christmas I bought her an external HD and loaded it up with PortableApps so she can have her office suite, photo editor, music library, etc. with her despite not having a computer of her own. The updater means she can keep up to date without me having to do it manually for each app

Also, I read earlier in this thread about people asking if there was a way to permanently disable updates for a particular app, but it turned out they just had an invalid configuration so it doesn't really tell me whether or not you can do that? Is it possible to disable updates for an app? My sister will be using Songbird Portable instead of iTunes for all of her music but she also has an iPod which she wants to sync to and the iPod plugin was abandoned after 1.2, so I want to keep her on that version, and she would probably forget and just update everything all together... I don't care if it's a hacky workaround like renaming the app folder and manually messing with AppInfo.ini, I just need to know if it's possible. Thanks

maybe an option to make a password to actually open up the menu.just to make it more secure and less of a way for your people to take the drive and see the menu

Where is the feature for Folder or Categories?
I havent been able to find it or is it still not enabled in beta 5?

Thanks

I've noticed this with the last few versions of the platform.

If you use the Install a New App, you get a dialog box that allows you to browse for the .paf.exe you want to install. If you click anywhere outside of that dialog box before you select something, both the box and the menu disappear.
After that you can't get them back. If you click the PA icon, either in the tray or the taskbar, they appear for a split second and disappear immediately. Same thing if you use Task Manager to switch to it.
If you use Alt+Tab, you don't see the PA Menu or the dialog box, so you can't use that to switch to it. (Note that normally Alt+Tab allows you to switch to the menu even when it's minimized).
The only way to get out is to force the menu to close, and restart the menu.

Can this be fixed? It would even be OK if the dialog box would cancel if you click outside of it, because you wouldn't be stuck; but ideally, you should be able to switch back to them at will.

I really need to stop using Google, it keeps sending me to outdated threads.

----

I think a folder that PortableApps misses is Downloads (\Documents\Downloads), which is inherent in most default Linux distributions along with the current generation of Windows (Vista/7). I would even place Downloads above Music/Pictures/Video because of its importance. I never access any of these three folders, because quite frankly I never have a need for them. Videos would run up the space on my drive quick, music I simply use YouTube or my MP3 player, and pictures I only use for Java programs.

But I download something every day from Firefox, and I always have to click into the directory.

Secondly, under Music/Pictures/Video it would be nice to have a Favorites button that expands into a menu of a user's favorite locations on the flash drive. I have some of my main documents seven directories into my flash drive and I hate using a Windows shortcut that breaks sometimes when the drive letter changes.

Yes, this is a bit of a bump, but I figured I should title this post with [BUG], so that maybe someone might confirm this.

PAM Locks Up During Installs If You Click Somewhere Else:

If you use the Install a New App, you get a dialog box that allows you to browse for the .paf.exe you want to install. If you click anywhere outside of that dialog box before you select something, both the box and the menu disappear.
After that you can't get them back. If you click the PA icon, either in the tray or the taskbar, they appear for a split second and disappear immediately. Same thing if you use Task Manager to switch to it.
If you use Alt+Tab, you don't see the PA Menu or the dialog box, so you can't use that to switch to it. (Note that normally Alt+Tab allows you to switch to the menu even when it's minimized).
The only way to get out is to force the menu to close, and restart the menu.

I've downloaded his beta previously and i have to say that you've done an excellent job, however, I wish to re-download it but the file seems to be missing, according to sourceforge that is. Is there a reason for this?

I just donated $10. Best $10 I've spent on software in a while!

Is this being worked on for Win7 Ultimate? I JUST downloaded the newest version and aboslutely LOVE the entire package. My only concern is the icon won't go away from the taskbar and stay in the systray like it does(did?) on WinXP. I'm a very minimalist person when it comes to my computer, and have very few icons on the taskbar(and none at all on the desktop). Can't wait for this to be fixed.

The updater is an awesome thing, the only issue I have with it is with uTorrent. uTorrent updates itself regularly, but the updater reverted it back to another version. Could this be because the update for uTorrent was a beta version?

Any way, keep up the excellent work! I've been using this since the very first release, and can't imagine NOT having it now!

[Edit: Can't spell.]

Wasn't exactly sure where to post this, as I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the Java release or the updater.

I ran the updater this morning, the new versions of Task Coach and uTorrent detected and updated fine, but Java 6 update 22 was not detected. I know I had the previous version installed though, because when I manually ran it the installer had to go through the uninstall process of the older version.

When an app contains an ampersand (&), the menu doesn't display it (the ampersand) and it underlines the next character. From my experience, this is how one usually tells the UI that he/she wants a shortcut key.