Hey everybody at Portable Apps,
This is my first post here, but I've been playing around with the PortableApps suite since I found out about it with my personal USB. I love the software, and I find it endlessly useful to have all my preset preferences wherever I take the thing.
I work in a place that deals with adults with special needs. After trying to setup 5 different computers to have identical settings for one of the participants, I started to think of my little USB device, and playing around with how I would go about doing this. USB sticks are relatively inexpensive, so getting a group to purchase the things, or even just having the families purchase them would be relatively easy (especially when compared to all of the eccentrically overpriced specialty equipment that is in the field).
Then you'd have to modify the portable menu to be more specialized for the person. This is still relatively easy, although I'm not exactly a programmer, so I'd need a bit of assistance.
The biggest problem is an issue that's been discussed on the boards before: Having programs that work on Macs. One of the peculiarities about the Special Needs industry is the unpredictability of what you'll be able to work with (in everything, but in this case specifically technology-wise). To be able to have a card that would be useful, it'd have to work on Macs (classic and OSX+), and Windows platforms. Now, I did a little research and found that (http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps) does this sort of stuff, so I'll be setting up an account with them and see who I can get to work this sort of device.
Here comes the fun(/much dreaded) part. Ideally, this card would be able to take cues from modifications to major preferences (like, bookmarks, shortcuts, and information banks) and keep them consistent through the platforms. So, say that I partitioned a USB Drive to have OSX and NTFS on it. If you made a bookmark on Firefox in Windows, the bookmark would save in common space, and then be read from by either version. Same thing goes for task schedulers and alerts for higher functioning participants. While this seems like a minor worry for a major, complicated coding experience, I must emphasize: for this population, identical experiences and synchronization are important. Otherwise I wouldn't have a reason to do a project like this.
After this base is done, things like secure storage of data for between families of participants, and the people who work with them, emergency information, and other such things could make having one of these devices a constant blessing for users.
This could be a really cool project, and while working on ways to bridge the PortableApp experience to the Mac (the biggest reason against, I believe, was that there wasn't enough demand?), you can know that your tech savvy will be able to make a (you might not believe it, but it's absolutely true) dramatic different in a person's life.
Thanks for listening and I hope to see you soon,
Barry
P.S. I'll be reading this for replies, but anyone interested can also contact me at werty8472 (at) yahoo (dot) com.
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Link for the FreeSMUG post: http://www.freesmug.org/forums/portableapps/979292509
Complex accessibility in the Platform could be quite... complex to put in. Better basic accessibility, such as the ability to power it entirely with the keyboard, is coming in the next release of the PortableApps.com Platform. As for any other things which you think could be useful, you'd need to say what they were for us to be able to comment on them.
Cross-platform functionality is currently only available via Wine (Darwine for Macs). In the PortableApps.com future, I personally have it in my plans to attempt fully cross-platform applications, but not for quite a long time yet. It's a fundamental shift which isn't viable or plausible yet. As for Mac OS 9 and earlier, forget it. As far as development is concerned it's a dead platform. None of us will support it at all.
There's just too much different between Mac OS and Windows at the moment. Even applications like Firefox vary in how they store their settings and how they behave between platforms (quite a few of the settings files have different names on OS X to what they have on Windows or Linux).
To put a quite serious slant on it, there's already enough going on with the Windows side of PortableApps.com and making it financially viable so that it can continue (and get better). If there were financial incentive in dealing with Linux or Mac OS X we might do it, but when there isn't, we'll tend to stick our "spare-time development" to Windows, making almost all of our (potential) users happy. Going cross-platform is a very big project (it would be practically a new project as far as development is concerned. We could take most of the concepts, but little or none of the code).
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Cross-platform computing is the next big thing after portability. Well, application portability shouldn't be as big a deal to us as it is, because apps were portable to start with, until Redmond meddled. But cross-platform is tricky.
The solution is not outside of the FOSS community's grasp, though, not by a long shot. And it's been done before. Diablo and Diablo II, PC/Mac games by Blizzard, are prime examples of how it works. The bulk of Diablo, the game, is stored in proprietary package files that any platform can read. The game disc includes two executables: one in Windows format, the other in Mac OS format. Each platform ignores the other's executable, and each executable runs great on its platform, and calls the data files. Therefore the game disc is playable on both PC and Mac.
But computer software like Firefox isn't mostly textures, sounds, and video, it's straight code. So the developers need to unload as much of that code as possible into an open file format that can be read regardless of your OS, and then have OS-specific executables that run all the code. Naturally, this will never be as efficient as platform-optimized code, but if you have a relatively recent machine, it shouldn't be a big deal. I mean hey, if Blizzard could do it 15 years ago, surely Mozilla and others can do it today, right? Oh, and those games ran great, they weren't plagued with bugs and other problems.
I wouldn't be so quick to say this was necessarily a bad thing, though. Things like the registry and per-user settings do make portability harder, but they're not inherently bad--lots of people share a computer, so the ability to have an app store its settings local to a user rather than machine-wide is definitely a plus. This wouldn't be possible if all apps were hard-coded to store their settings in the app directory.
Well, I could understand that there would be major implications for installing a single software portfolio between two setups (ie, Windows AND Mac Firefox), but I don't see any reason why that has to happen for this project. As cool as it would be to create some instantly translating code thing, I recognize that that's not feasible.
However, you don't need to have everything or nothing to work. For instance, if we could make a portable intermediate plugin that wrote code into a singular basic text format, and then had that same program translate the text back into the format that is typically used, could that work?
So, have a little txt file (txt is readable between Mac and PCs, right?) sit on a separate partition. The intermediate program would read from the list to create information that is readable for the host program (so, Firefox bookmarks that wrote into txt, then read the txt to form the actual bookmark.) Then have each platform read the txt file in the way that is native, and save a lot of time and hassle.
Does this come across clear? I mean, I understand that there's a language barrier between Mac and PC, but what if they both were left to their own programming structure, and then had a little addon that worked between them independently? It should work for extremely small bits of data, like time/date input, and bookmarks since the information that is being requested would have to be accessed in pure text anyways, right?
http://www.theplaceforitall.com/portablefirefox/
I found a portable Firefox that automatically updated profiles between Mac and Windows, but the version was 1.5, and I couldn't get it to work on my setup. Apparently the FreeSMUG Portable Firefox version was based off of it, though.
Maybe I'll contact the guy, and ask him for assistance with this project. That sort of 'profile connect' thing seems like it would fix the whole multi-OS thing, granted that the Firefox Browser has the profile thing already integrated.
Also, looks like Task Coach Portable runs multiplatform, and has a variety of link-ups. I'm currently installing it, and I'll see if I can align the information. If not, I imagine it'd be fairly easy to connect them.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080411155517808