I have found a way to use any standalone dock launcher (such as RKLauncher http://home.cogeco.ca/~rklauncher/ or y'z dock http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2790 ) but it is tedious.
In case you dont know what a dock launcher is, It's basically a program launcher that looks like the macOS launcher. It's a clean and efficient way to launch programs, and in my eyes, is a better alternative to the portable launching apps avaliable. The problems is that although RKLauncher and y'z dock are standalone applications, they have trouble using relative paths for shortcuts, rendering them useless as a portable app.
The workaround I have found entails using batch files as shortcuts and using NirCmd (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html) to supress the command prompt windows that ususally result from executing a batch file. Batch files can use relative paths. It's a time consuming process, but I have finally molded RKLauncher into a portable launcher for my purposes.
If anyone is interested in further explanation, let me know. Again, it's not a quick fix process, but it works.