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General state of development

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MJCD
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General state of development

Hi everyone,

First time post obviously - I am a developer of some 15 or so years with a focus on user experiences.

I find PAF to be legendary in concept, but it seems... far from polished, and often heavy handed (IE: Hexchat only needs a blank file called 'portable' in the root folder to do a portable install heh). It also seems to ONLY provide a locked down environment, which is good in principle but not always what's desired - with long term use there's bound to be small changes the user desires (usually visually not that it matters) and it seems like to do that they need to hand edit differing config structures app by app.

A good starting point might be to add cloud sync of *environment* (not apps themselves just the configs) as a core part of the "store", saved as "app states" with nicknames. Perhaps even an editor for those configs (several web ones available including vscodes editor monaco) as part of it all.

Also just a lot of general... Styling and actions and integration and all that good stuff. I feel like i'm using openoffice and it makes me want MS office, as a metaphore.

I am keen to hear other feedback and issues/hazards to avoid/embrace as I am looking at using this system more widely within our organization, and am also happy to contribute however is most productive. As I say I am UX focused so I don't really want to spend all day doing bugfixes - but more widely the experience of the entire ecosystem.

Thanks for all your work so far, whoever haha. It's a fantastic concept, and i'm also keen to hear technical details of how it does what it does.

Complete sidenote: Is it possible to hide the portableapps.com banner as pop-up ads do not instill confidence in users

John T. Haller
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Not Sure What You Mean

Lots of apps have mostly portable variants. The goal here is to standardize all of them to use a given directory structure for easy install, upgrade, backup/restore, reset, and uninstall. The goal is 'it just works' without any user effort. All your app stuff is in AppName\App. All your user data is in AppName\Data for every app.

If you'd like exact control and a manual directory structure, you'll need to learn how each individual app works and manually set environment variables, write code to handle registry key moves, etc.

If you mean the splash screens, it's right on the support page. A simple checkbox in the PA.c Platform: https://portableapps.com/support/portable_app#disable-splash

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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