Desktop Sidebar

I love the program and wanted a portable version too.

The software is free, but not open source. KDAM, the program author, posted an "unofficial" portable version in the site's forums at

http://www.desktopsidebar.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4404&st=0&p=365...

Search the page for "kdam" - it's about halfway down the page - and you can download his file "sidebarb90.zip". This is not an installation package, but rather is a directory you just unzip to or copy to your portable drive. It's also not the newest version (version 90 vs. the current 116).

In another forum, I read they won't release an "official" portable version, since they want to keep using .Net to program panels, and expect it will cause all sorts of problems to develop and support a portable one.

On another forum discussion at the website, Indian_Mayhem suggested you look for the file

dsidebar.xml and edit
   item name="settingsDir" value="$appData\$name"
in dsidebar.xml to
   item name="settingsDir" value="$installDir\settings"

He was talking about installing a regular version to make it portable, but I made this change to this version to prevent any settings from being written on the host computer, and to have any changes saved on the portable drive. I have been able to run it without a hitch and it left no files on the system I tried it on after I made this change.

However, there are a few points to note:

1) The unzipped directory produces a portable version. However, the zip file includes an install batch file which you run once on the host computer to register some of the files. Thus, while the app is portable, it is not the kind of portable program that leaves behind no trace on the host computer. The install bat contains these lines if you are interested...

dsidebar.exe /regserver
regsvr32 basicpanels.dll
regsvr32 outlookpanels.dll
regsvr32 sbhelp.dll

2) Desktop Sidebar does not require .Net to run as I understand it (though I don't have a .Net-less system to try it on). However, a number of the panels you can download and add do, so you either have to run the portable version on a computer with .Net, or don't add extra panels that require .Net. You should be able to read the forum entries for the panel to see if it's needed or not, but honestly I think most of the panels do require it.

3) If you have Desktop Sidebar installed on your computer, you can copy installed theme folders from your computer into the portable directory and use them - I did without a problem for my three favorite themes - but I didn't try installing them on the portable version alone. However, the program chokes for some reason if you delete the preinstalled themes, so leave those alone. I was able to delete the panels (like the outlook ones) that I did not want though, after I disabled them in the program's configuration menu.

4) The slideshow and toolbar panels are built in, and require in the options panel a hardcoded directory for the images to display and the toolbar to show. However, these hardcoded directories are saved in Desktop Sidebar\settings\sidebar105.xml. I was able to edit this file and simply change the hard coded path to a relative one and it worked fine for the slideshow images, but NOT for my personal toolbar. The toolbar will display system toolbars for the host system like quicklaunch and recent documents and such, however.

I think I covered everything... hope this helps.
Richard