Just wondering, I like the PopMan program, pretty neat but sometimes it seems I've got to click on it twice in the menu.
New: NAPS2 (Feb 24, 2025), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
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You cannot start portable apps with the OS as by default they reside on portable drives where the driveletter changes and therefore they cannot start automatically.
But:
They can be set to start with the platform and theoretically you could have a shortcut to the local install of the platform in your autostart folder.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
IIRC, Windows tries to assign the same drive letter for a drive if it has been used previously.
Previously known as kAlug.
Hi,
I am just installing to C:\
Cheers
Well, probably the easiest way for the average end-user to set a program to start with Windows is to make a shortcut to it in the Start Menu > "Programs" (or "All Programs") > "Startup" folder; for a PortableApp make sure you point your shorrcut to the AppNamePortable.exe (in this case PopManPortable.exe); also anything which starts with Windows should be on permanent storage (e.g.
C:\PortableApps), so as to eliminate the issues enumerated by Simeon in the first comment of this thread. However This won't solve your problem.The problem you're experiencing is because you're Shutting down Windows (or otherwise killing the PortableApp's processes) without properly exiting the App. This prevents the PortableApps' Launcher from cleaning up after the Base App thus the next time the PortableApp is run it does the cleanup that it should have done at the previous app exit; recent versions of the PortableApps.com Launcher notify the user when this occurs, but PopMan Portable is still (as of 1.3.1) using an older Launcher, which does this clean up, but does not notify the user.
The proper way to fix your issue is: Manually exit all programs (and especially PortableApps) prior to Shutting Down Windows.
[P.S.: PopMan Portable should be updated to a more recent version of PAL so as to notify the user of post-crash cleanups if nothing else.]
~3D1T0R
I should probably update the PopMan launcher...
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Won't that just produce that annoying crash message each time the program is started?
It will not "produce that annoying crash message each time the program is started". It will only produce the message about the app having been improperly exited if the app has been … (you guessed it) exited, improperly!
But yes, that will add in the crash message which is not present in PopMan Portable 1.3.1. But you really shouldn't think of it as ‘just producing an error message’ as the error has happened whether the message is shown or not, and the cleanup is going to happen, and thus the app is not going to start, whether a message is shown or not.
Thus when PopMan Portable has been updated to a version of PAL which includes the AppCrash MessageBox at least users who come across the issue you were noticing will in the future understand WHY they're having issues, and perhaps learn to close the app manually before exiting Windows, eh?
~3D1T0R
Not wanting to argue semantics (kind of reminds me of whirlpool forum) but for whatever reason it happens, it disrupts my workflow and yet I am to blame?
I think as developers you can do better, which is why I personally don't feel any guilt at all in not donating to this cause because for all the time saved in portability, it is being wasted dismissing popups.
Close it when you're done with it. Do not shutdown Windows and have Windows crash the app. Windows shutdown doesn't properly close apps that don't support it, it crashes them (and Windows 8 crashes them even if they do support it so it can 'shutdown faster' to the user). Just as surely as pulling the power chord out of the wall or yanking the battery from your laptop. You'll lose your settings. That's what the warning is. When you stop doing bad things to your apps, you'll stop getting the warnings.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Ok so now we've moved from blaming the end user, to blaming the OS.
Surely you can write a script or something to close all open apps for me or are you saying I have to close them one by one?
The ability to close them all automatically via the platform is coming in 12.0. Until then, please stop crashing your apps. You're going to lose data/settings, etc. The warnings aren't there to hassle you. They're there to let you know that something went wrong. Something that's preventable.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It's not a "You screwed up the app, now we have to fix it" message, it's a "The app crashed, we're fixing it, if you can prevent it from crashing again, we won't have to fix it again" message. Whether you intentionally crashed the app or it got killed by some other means, the app has no way of knowing, that's why I said it as "exited improperly" and such in the other posts (for the benefit of others who may find this thread because they're having similar, but not necessarily identical problems in the future). When you come to these forums and say ‘I'm having a problem, this is what's happening, please fix it.’ we tell it like it is: ‘This is what's happening, at the moment there's nothing we can do to prevent it on our end, there is something you can do to prevent it on your end, we'll add a notice that tells the user what happened, we're trying to fix it from our end, in the mean-time try to prevent it and it'll stop "disrupting your workflow".’
Please don't take our attempts to answer your questions & help you like it's condemnation,no-one's trying to lay blame anywhere, and we really are trying to help you; also please remember that this project takes a lot of work and nobody gets paid anything for their contributions, in fact many in this community donate personal time & funds to improve what's available here. I think a little appreciation might not be a bad thing eh?
~3D1T0R
Johns' answer is enough for me at least to have something to look forward to and it seems (as usual) that nothing is forgotten in as much as the groundwork for this most excellent selection of applications is concerned.
I have to ask you. What was the purpose of this comment?
The issue isn't even PortableApps. It's software in general. It has to know when it's being shutdown, and when to write settings back to the disk. That's why you need to instruct Windows to shut down instead of holding the power button. Certainly, if you're on Vista or above, Windows will ask you to to close running programs before you shut down. Hitting "Force shutdown" is never the right option to do.
I don't use force and I take issue at any suggestion that the fault lies with either myself as an end user or the OS I am using.
Plain and simple, usability is the issue and having to close each application manually is both time wasting and tiresome.
Regardless, as John said, there will be support to close any and all applications at once in a future build so I guess this means all applications must become conformant or potentially be dropped from the update schedule.
Hello I did have the issue you outlined regarding the base app, making the system on the whole annoying but does the app quality outweigh the negativity of using it?
I'd say yes.
About starting with windows, I guess the registry would be out, as a method to auto-start with the OS, maybe a shortcut might suffice in particular for programs like email checking but I guess I don't want to stray too far from the stated goal of quality open source software or making it do things it wasn't intended, just an idea.
Cheers