Hello,
I just got a freeware Bulgarian-English dictionary which comes as a ZIP package making it pretty portable. The only thing is it does write quite a lot to the registry so I was wondering how hard would it be to create a portable launcher.
I don't have any experience with this nor am I programmer but I was wondering if there are some ready-made procedures for making portable launchers and since the only thing that has to be taken care of are the registry writes - well I just guessed it might be not that hard...
What do you think?
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well I have 1 issue, you said it's portable because it's in a zip, but yet it writes to the registery, that negates what you said the first half
but yeah I suggest playing with 7-ZipPortable's source, and grab NSISPortable and play with it and see what you come up with
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
I said it's petty portable since you don't have to install it. Thanks for the suggestion - I'll toy around with it and see what I can do!
EDIT: Is there like a manual on how to do this kind of stuff as I don't understand much of the source...
You can find Chris Morgan's generic launcher in the Beta Testing forum, I believe it is. Just use regshot to see what registry entries it's making, and tweak the .ini file it comes with (the generic launcher, I mean) to route them to the data folder.
Also a program can be portable and still write to the registry. Just as long as it doesn't require those registry entries when you launch it on a new computer. Writing to the registry just means it's not stealthy. Also the first time most (all?) portable apps run, they write to the registry, but the launcher cleans up, moves the registry entries to a file. Next time it runs, the launcher puts the registry entries back. It's called sandboxing. At least that's my understanding.
The NSIS launcher is the long way and the hard way. And the old way, as I understand JTH's and Chris Morgan's posts. I've heard talk of doing everything with this Swiss Army knife of launchers, and more recently, C++ and wxWidgets over NSIS. Least I think that's what I read...
Also there has got to be a free dictionary/translator that is already portable and maybe even PAF'd, but I don't know of any.
Thanks! I'll check into that!
As for the program - by your definition it is portable only not stealthy - it can run without the registry (if they are removed or on a new machine) only its settings will be lost. As for another dictionary - this is the best of its kind that I know of and since it now comes in a ZIP package with no need to install I thought I'd leverage on that and see if I can make it truly portable.
Thanks again!
Just so you know, there's a bit of a controversy over those two terms. Some will swear up and down that PortableApps leave absolutely nothing behind, but this is not true. The official story is that they leave no personal information behind, and this is accurate.
Portability means that you can put it on a removable disk and it will work from computer to computer. The only thing it can depend on is Windows - it has to run on some version of Windows. It has to run on computers without Visual Basic, .NET, Java, things like this. It can write to the registry as long as it cleans up after itself. However, traces are still left and PortableApps makes no effort to hide them. One example is MRUCache - MRU stands for Most Recently Used. This is harmless, but it is a trace.
Stealthy means it covers up its tracks. This is clever, but not everybody really wants stealth. A stealthy portable application covers all tracks, so the owner of the computer cannot prove that you ever ran it. A stealthy app, thus, has to take extra steps. If it uses the Internet, it can't be stealthy, because e.g. at a job site or school, the Internet is routed through other computers which will defeat its stealthiness. Media players, text editors, utilities, and games, however, can be made stealthy.
While stealth may not be what everyone wants, an app like CleanAfterMe can compensate for apps being portable and not stealthy by removing all those traces in one sweep.