Portable App Development

Okay, well since there are no official PAF specs and the unofficial ones carry "don't use this" status, I figure I'll ask a different way: what do I have to do to my app if I wanted to release it on PA.com now?

I mean, if there's no specs and we're not supposed to use the unofficial ones, how is anyone supposed to release anything?

Okay, I found this out a while ago.
When a portable application such as Pidgin or Miranda runs, windows will store the settings for the behavior of the system tray icon [Always Show, Always Hide, Hide when Inactive] in the registry. However, when the program closes, these settings are kept and will be displayed under "Past Items" in the customize notifications part of the Taskbar & Start Menu Properties. This exposes all the applications which use system tray icons, that have previously been running on the computer. *gasps*

I'm working on making a launcher for a app called Skinner. But I keep getting this annoying message. My Code is:

Outfile ..\..\SkinnerPortable.exe
Name "Skinner Portable"
Icon "..\..\App\AppInfo\appicon2.ico"
SilentInstall Silent
AutoCloseWindow True
RequestExecutionLevel user

!include "FileFunc.nsh"
!include "ReplaceInFile.nsh"
!include "Registry.nsh"
!insertmacro GetRoot

Var APPDIR
Var SETDIR

Section Main
	
		System::Call 'kernel32::CreateMutexA(i 0, i 0, t "SkinnerPortable"2) i .r1 ?e'
			Pop $0
			StrCmp $0 0 DefineVariables TheEnd
		
		DefineVariables:

ok well i'm about to have to redo the png optimization for Secret Maryo Chronicles 1.5 and i wanted to know what you recommend to do. I was going to use OptiPNG but i wasn't sure what options to use to get the best optimization without messing up the graphics.

Hi all,

I've noticed that quite a few PortableApps include gdiplus.dll (and require it on Win2K and down); OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, Task Coach, Scribus, RegShot, and my own BPBible being the ones I've noticed so far.
Should we be moving that to the CommonFiles directory and setting %path% to include that? The file is about a megabyte, and, well... every megabyte counts.

What do others think?

Anyone think of password locking the PortableApps executable?

I'm messing with an emulated Slax on my USB And it's just too big. Can I UPX or compress the ISO's and still have it run through Qemu?

PS: Why not DSL? It's not persistent without partitioning your USB drive, I want to make this as painless as possible.

is it possible to query the name of the only folder inside my specified folder?

I know this has been posted many times before, but so far, I've only seen people saying that a portable iTunes won't work because it is a computer dependent program - it only works on one computer at a time. But is it possible to make it think that the USB device is the actual computer? ...and then I would just have to create a launcher for QuickTime?

I'm not asking for anybody to do this for me or even tell me how to do it. I'm just wondering if it's a possible idea to make iTunes a portable app without resulting to desktop virtualization.

Do you think it would be possible to make some sort of a tutorial on how to take an app that is FOSS and make it into a PortableApp? Because I would love to learn how to do that but I have no idea. I'd like to learn how to take the files of the app and sort them into App and Data folders, make the launcher, make the installer, etc. Is there any way that I could somehow learn this?