PortableApps.com Platform 2.0 Beta 5 Released For Testing

You truthfully have made the longer wait worth it. I no longer have to go through the website every month checking for updates. Thanks a bunch.
One question though: does the updater support updates to the app compactor, app launcher and other development apps installed on the drive?

I use a .Designator system to identify my apps; eg AppName.C = app compatible with PAc, .OS = Command line based portable app; .J = Java based portable app; .M menu driven (could be .N = not compatable) portable app.

Why call the apps AppName Portable in the PortableApps folder when they are by definition portable; just call them AppName, or at least allow for that posibility in the design of the PAc Platform.

John, would it be difficult to allow a single letter press to jump to the first App beginning with that letter in the menu?

Hi all,

I like Portable Apps, it was a really great idea from John.

I would like to ask just about that when could i read the Portable Apps menu with my speaking software? (I am visually impaired).

It needs only a simple text menu i think, for example similar menu that - a menu that QMenu program creates- which is also readable by all speaking software.

The QMenu is available at:
http://arcaneincantations.mvps.org/QMenu.htm

When i right-click a Portable Apps.com Platform icon on the System tray i can only read:
Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, explore, eject, exit.

Sincerely, Csabi

Hi,

I would like to submit a minor update error that appears not to have been addressed.
The updater is reporting the following error:

Download Error: File Not Found (404) on file http://downloads.sourceforge.net/portableapps/Warzone2100Portable_2.3.1a...

And on the page https://portableapps.com/apps/games/warzone_2100_portable
the file download link is:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/portableapps/Warzone2100Portable_2.3.1a...

Many thanks for a great piece of software.
Phip.

Menu request:

• More Info about the app:
  

  ClamWin Portable 0.96.1 Rev 3
  ClamWin Team & PortableApps.com
  \PortableApps\ClamWinPortable

  Info: ClamWin Portable is the popular ClamWin Free Antivirus packaged with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your antivirus with you on your iPod, USB flash drive, portable hard drive, etc. It has all the same great features as ClamWin including excellent detection rates and regular updates with a built-in updater. Plus, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take it with you wherever you go.

• Large Icon/Small Icon,
• Expandable to the Left/right/Top - to show more apps (not resizable),
• Item order on the right side,
• Sorting options (By Name, Latest, Frequently Used, text length),
• Shortcut key/s: ~/` - show hide the PA.c menu, F1 - Help/About/Owner Info,
• integrated wallpaper changer w/ many options like random images, etc.,
• Startup sound/music,
• Searchbox/Filter,
• textbox (Math Equation solver, word lookup, spelling correction),
• Default Browser,
• Futuristic,
• Techno,
• Sound Effects,
• Font/Color,
• Cursor,
• Icon sets,
• animated banner,
• Flag,
• Auto change Personal Picture,
• centralized help file images (donation, banner),
• Application state checker/tracker (when you click on the integrated eject button it must check first if the apps on the drive are still running),
• alerter/popup baloon in notification area (will alert every 1hr(can be set) to notify you the total time you are focused in the computer and remind you to do stretching, look at the wall, drink water, etc.),
• Optional Clock on the menu:
  • Onhover/click time of day information (night, day, sunset, moon, newmoon, fullmoon, quartermoon, halfmoon, crescentmoon, eclipse, sun, stars, current Zodiac sign {pisces, scorpio, etc.}, Year of the {Fire pig, Metal horse, etc.}),
• Optional Snow,
• integrated Youtube browser (the menu will expand),
• Integrated Instant Messenger,
• Integrated Realtime Magnifier (Virtual Magnifying Glass is not realtime {screenshot}),
• flash drive Vaccine? Can you make the autorun.inf permanent like what Panda security do but you can customize the file before making it permanent?
• integrated hash checker on startup (will check only the platform's hash to make sure that you are not infected w/ virus when you are using it on a computer without antivirus.),
• Window mascot/s:
  • options to sing,
  • greet,
  • talk,
  • encourage,
  • do tricks,
  • read books(selectable),
  • read menu items,
  • eye-movement (option to always look at the cursor/menu items),
  • can interact w/ other mascot,
  • Overhead Cloud baloon (w/ texts, thinking of something, Word of the day, This day in history of PA.c (ClamWin Portable has become Part of the Suite), Quote of the day, Teaching (Do you know that you can...)),

Optional:

• File extention manager
  • ex. instead of .exe we use .eze or other extension as file extension of Apps but the menu will treat it as .exe (to avoid some viruses because a month ago I used my FD to the ICafe and all my applications got infected except my documents)
• Flash drive owner info: (Optional Effect: Onclick scroll to the left/right/pop-up)
• Name,
• School {Optional: Section, Year Level, Course, schedules, School Address, Favorite Subject/s, website},
• Work (Optional: Looking for this kind of job, Specialties, Employment Status, work history},
• address,
• Email,
• IM accts.,
• SNS,
• Contact No.,
• Birthdate,
• Zodiac sign,
• Optional:
  • Bio,
  • I Play this Games: (gamename1, gamename2),
  • Favorites (color, etc.)

My feature request has a patent.
joke! XD

[Made vaguely readable by putting in HTML right through - mod Chris]

Someone can say me why in PortableApps.com Platform Setup 2.0 Beta 5 the Armenian is missing???

First off, you should put back the "refresh apps icons" back, without "icons". Because when I put a non-portable app into the portable apps folder, I gotta restart P.A.Platform.

Also, on my sister's XP, most themes have some pink (opacity?) on the transparent corners (on the extreme upper-left & right corners).

So yeah, nothing big but something handy.

How do I get my own themes to work with the new beta? It seems that the Chrome graphics want to overlay on top of everything, each time I switch. How do I stop this?

Considering that after the integration of the updater into the menu the development of the original updater stopped, I felt like I lost something. Now it's finally back.

The latest Beta is extremely interesting - it looks like you've incorporated a lot of improvements from the previous release. However I did notice that the text is hard to read on the menu - especially on the dark themes. The older version of PortableApps.com had a more vivid red frame and the text was more white - now the frame is a more washed out shade (it doesn't matter what color theme I choose) and the text is grey (which is REALLY hard to read on the dark theme).

On the other hand I like the update feature in the package (it's been a change I've looked for for some time and I think you have the making of a real winner...)

Keep on working on the product - I think 2.0 will be a significant improvement.

Just installed and tried out the new Platform Beta. I love the update option - thought that I had my apps up to date but it updated 23 apps on my flash drive.
The platform worked well with PA on a 16Gb drive and running on a Lenovo X60 laptop with WinXP SP3.
No problem with the firewalls in the office and only one update (Thunderbird I think) "interupted" the automatic update with a "read the Terms and Conditions." Everything seems to be smooth.

hi!
i instaled the new beta, it is very beautiful! but there is two bugs that i didnt find in forum, so i would like to report here...the first one: i cant bring up the PA menu with the keyboard shortcut (win+p) what could happend?
an the second i will show in the following pic...
http://yfrog.com/mmtaskbarj

http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/488/taskbar.jpg

thank you everybody!
sry for my bad english =/

Why are there two icons for PA when it is active? There is one on the task bar and one on the systems tray. In the past there have only been one, on the tray. Is there any way you can make this an option to turn the extra icon on or off? It seems redundant.

I clicked on "Check for updates" and was told that Mozilla Firefox 3.6.8 was available (as expected). I set the update going, the download completed and I got an error box (as expected) to tell me that FF was running, and to close it to allow the upgrade to complete.

Before I had had a chance to do this, a second box popped up telling me "Software update complete". But of course it hadn't completed because FF was running.

I then closed FF and ran the process again. Once again it told me that 3.6.8 was available and this time the update completed normally.

But of course it started the whole upgrade again - including downloading the 10MB file again. Should the update utility not be aware of whether or not the update has actually completed?

Regards

Nick

One of the app updates today was:

https://portableapps.com/news/2010-07-23-_java_portable_6_update_21

I have java 6.20 installed in e:\PortableApps\CommonFiles\Java
but the updater didn't offer it for update. I claim it should update
common platform files as well.

It did offer to update pidgin, firefox and 7zip though.

Thanks.

-- rouilj

John T. Haller, is it possible to make the PortableApps.com Platform with built-in security system?
There is a program I use on my pendrive that it locks the pendrive when I unplug it from the pc. And everytime I insert my pendrive on my pc, it asks for the password. I'd like to know if there is a chance of you to make a portableapps.com platform that could lock the pendrive or any other storage device when you eject or unnplug it from the pc, and ask for a password just after you plug it on the pc.
Thanks.

I received an email where someone asked the above question. The answer was given in a TechWorld article about the 12 Russian spies which were deported back to Russia recently. A portionof the article is below:

Have you heard the one about the 21st century Russian spy ring?

TechWorld’s article, FBI crackers fail to crack TrueCrypt, provides a decent overview of the disk encryption situation. The article might be regarded as a review and recommendation for the use of TrueCrypt for your disk encryption needs, offered by the FBI itself, even if that was not an intentional effect of the FBI’s involvement. A single case does not truly prove anything except that, in this one case, those seeking to crack TrueCrypt security failed — but it is certainly an interesting piece of information to consider when selecting disk encryption software, especially on the MS Windows platform where open source disk encryption choices are fewer and farther between than on open source OSs.
The FBI ran into a hurdle it could not overcome in its investigation in the form of
TrueCrypt, an (arguably) open source software disk encryption application available for
MS Windows, Apple MacOS X, and Linux-based systems. Evidently, the primary technique used to try to crack it was a brute force attack on the user’s password, and the
failure of the effort speaks well of the importance of strong passwords. Not only the FBI, but Brazilian counterparts as well, spent months in the attempt.

I just downloaded and installed the PA.c Platform Beta 5 and ran the updater straight away. I have 22 programs to update in all (probably all of them).

Computer: Eee PC 1005HA
Operating system: Windows XP SP3
PortableApps drive: SanDisk 16GB flash drive (Came with U3 on it but I removed it)

It seems to be running quite well, except I got an error message saying something like "Google chrome portable installer is invalid and cannot be installed. Please try downloading again". Would it be possible for PA.c Updater to automatically detect this and re-download itself? From memory, I think many Google Chrome Portable installer have had this issue in the past...

Oh it just popped up asking me to agree to Skype's EULA. I ticked the box and clicked next - it hung for a while, but then closed and seems to have carried on installing. That seems to be fine.

Also, I think the PA.c Updater keeps taking focus from my other windows, just briefly. Not that it comes to the front, it just seems to cause my other window to lose focus - e.g. arrow keys will stop scrolling in Adobe Reader until I select the window again. That's a bit annoying.

Okay it's finished and given me a confirmation message. Now I'm going to try running it again... - it says "your portable apps are up to date" - what happened to that invalid Chrome install? I'm confused...

Two other points:
- Can we make the updater more obvious to find? It's a little hidden away.
- Can we make the updater notify us when there are updates? Or does it do that already? I waited a little while when I opened the menu before loading the updater manually, and it didn't pop up with anything...

Hope this is helpful.

Cheers,
Robin.

I'm testing the Portable applications Platform v2 beta 5 Pre 2 and, there are some omissions and a small error in "Options>Theme" section. I would like to complete the translation of the omissions, and although I have contributed the translation previously, now could not find the correct place in forum.
Thanks.

awesome, new themes, looks. so good.

hello, how can i minimize it to tray.

now it is open like normal programms in task-line. i want to have it like the 2.0 Beta2 version

please

PA.c Updater is very useful!
but can't minimize to icon on Windows 7 64bit.

realy nice the new platform
but what would be nice is some categorizing or the option to sort the apps
and not only stick some to top via favs

Hi!

Really it is not a big problem. The updater updated my thunderbird 3.1.1 Hungarian to the new 3.1.2 English version so it wasn't detect that i using Thunderbird another language than English.

Sincerely, Csabi

Hi!

The language of my PortableApps menu was already set to Hungarian at the first time when i start to use it.
My PortableAppsMenu.ini contains the following:
[DisplayOptions]
Language=Hungarian

But the updater downloaded the English version of Thunderbird.
Really it is not a big problem, i can download the Hungarian Installer (as You wrote) i only would like to help You to report a bug.

Sincerely, Csabi

Hey I haven't really kept up on the comments here, so I don't know if this has already been suggested, but it would be really neat to use the updater for the "Get New Apps" option in the menu. All you would have to do is list the apps NOT installed instead of the ones that are. This would seem to be a much more polished and self-contained method of obtaining new apps as opposed to the current open-the-default-browser-to-the-website method.

Finally the updater has become compatible again, thanks!! I use it very much to have my PAs up to date.

One thing that is missing is that we don't received all the list of PAs anymore, that was very helpful when using it in a fresh computer, I would simply select the PAs that I want to install, download them and woila! everything is set up.

love the app style and loading advanced features locked in and loaded also on the first I would like to see an add diveder option to seperate groups of apps or may a show apps by folder and increase the search depth on sub folder searches for apps so they become easyer to manage other than that i have had no problems with it keep working on it.

running on 8gb flash with about 700 custom and downloaded apps

Hi all,
I like the V2 but one thing I don't like: the hold-up during initialization.
I understand that at startup it is looking for installed applications. Can't this be faster? Waiting for more than 2 minutes while having 28 apps installed, is too long!
Regards,
Marc Jagt
PortableApps fan

Hi John,

i constantly get an error, when i check for updates.
A new update is found "PortableApps.com AppCompactor 2.0.1" and i update it.
It looks like it went smoothly.
But the next time i check for updates it´s there again it will be found over and over.

its a hell lot slower than my normal speed
It is useful only if it can grab the speed otherwise normal update would be much better

PA.c Platform 2.0 beta 5 not supported older version pathemes. this will be fixed?

Just tried the new (beta) version; scanned for apps, found things that I manually put in the PortableApps tree that aren't PortableApps programs, seemed okay.

Used the theme feature to inspect various options before settling on blue.

Tried the autoupdater. It found 16 out-of-date apps, prompted me to close (what I believed to be an already up-to-date) Firefox before updating it, did everything then reported some sort of error. (Sorry, I hit OK before noting the details.)

It didn't stop working; however, the icons for the apps were all gone. After hiding everything I didn't want to see, I found the "refresh icons" option. Used it. The launcher then reported that it had run out of resources and crashed. On reload, the icons were put back and the programs I'd chosen to hide stayed hidden but the theme I'd set had reverted to default.

One other comment: my autorun.inf was set to run another launcher entirely. (Pstart.exe. Maybe not everyone's taste but I like being able to cascade menus and group programs, of which I have lots, thematically.) The PortableApps launcher, presumably during installation, had overwritten it with its own version without asking. I don't think I approve.

-- tjp

I have used Portable apps for some years and they are absolutely brilliant.

I am not usually a beta tester of programs, but the automatic update facility caught my eye so I had to try it and it worked perfectly and saved me a lot of time. Congratulations on a real step forward in functionality and thanks for your hard work.

However, at the risk of sounding churlish, I find the colour scheme and the font in the right panel of the launcher makes the text hard to read, particularly for those older users amongst us. Compared with the original launcher, the colour schemes look dark, gloomy even, and when combined with the thin white lettering, I find myself squinting to read the text.

Would it be possible to make the fonts a bit thicker, like those in the original, and can we have the original, brighter colours as one of the theme options - apologies not tech savy enough to make my own themes etc?

thanks again

Do I just install this ON TOP of the existing installation (version 1.5.2) or is there an update or upgrade option ?

I've been keeping an eye on the site, but not sure what is going on. When Beta 5 was released on July 16, it was said "we'll be releasing a new beta every week or two until we hit 2.0 final".

What is going on? I don't have much time to sift thru the various comments here or on the forums, but there has obviously been some problems. But in light of the huge delay, it would seem the problems have been worse than I thought or far from easy to overcome.

John or anyone else, thanks in advance for the feedback.

It is great to see the update of PortableApps Platform 2.0 beta5, I've just download and using it right now, thanks for people who made great application to keep life easier than ever :). BTW, I wanted to feedback and suggest somethings I think we can make the PortableApps more better.

-) Good things:
+ Update application: it is great and special feature I have looking for a long time. But I think it will be faster performance and decrease network bandwidth to download update by using update package like patch method.
==> Solutions: We'll make a change list for old & new version of app then package only difference things between versions.
+ Great new theme engine and nice bundled default theme fit many people favorite
-) Missing things:
+ Quick search bar on the top to allow user search app quickly.
==> Solutions: cache the application list to make faster access for search and app list display. We can use sqlite or any embed database to store things then we can search through, update, sort .... easily
+ Scollbar: I have install and convert many applications to use with PortableApp but now it become very hard and is pain to search any application because of the currently scroll method (using 2 button to scroll up & down) is too too slow and make my eyes tired to looking for something.
==> Solutions: Provide settings to make scrollbar visible on the app listing. It can be a normal scroll as native container or advanced bar like some Mac OS X scrollbar, also it should have a alphabetical list of the application to get more quickly to focus the the first letter of applications.

if you need any help or more detail, pls contact with me at: tiger2wander [at] gmail [dot] com

---
Best regard!
Uoc Nguyen

I sure hope PortableApps isn't dead, it's been a while since anything's been updated really, two weeks? I didn't count.

Is there a problem with this? It's been ages since the beta 5 was released. If you need new developers to help out, say so. There might be more people out there willing to help than you'd think.

(Hi, I hope it's the right place to report a bug, I couln't find another place)

So, when i launch the portableapps manager, all of my desktop icons disappear. When i close it, the icons come back.

The updater is not stable.
Today I tried to update 6 applications. 3 of them ended up with "invalid".
Being: Clamwin, Thunderbird and Firefox.

This is not the first time. Too many update actions fail.

Hi John!

I have made my own theme in version 1.6.1 of the menu and I was wondering if I could use it in version 2 when it is released.

Thanks in advance for any help

Dan43.