Portable App Development

I want to know what people think of a feature for auto running apps when you plug in the flash drive and start up portable apps.

How I see it working is you can select auto running two ways for apps. Auto run on this machine or auto run on all machines.

The auto run on this machine feature would create a file somewhere on the local machine storing which apps to autorun, it could also name the file with unique id that is also stored on the flash drive so another flash drive with the same app wont auto run.

Well, i was recently messing around with Desktop.ini files using Microsoft's default OS way of doing it (right click on a folder, customize etc. ) but i got bored of that, and ended up writing my own. While doing so, i realised that after giving the Desktop.ini files the appropriate permissions to be used (hidden, system file etc.) i could still access them and edit them.

And from this i thought, "Hey, what if people have sensitive files and don't want random people using their computer to see them? They could use this nifty technique to solve their problems!"

There seem to be two schools of thought out there. One has version numbering follow the original app. The other uses a portable version for numbering.

The most common way seems to be the original app numbering.

There also seems to be differences on alpha, beta, RC, or PRE-RELEASE.

Any thoughts?

--

The Kazoo Spartan

I wish that there is a way that users can modify the main concole as that apps could be stored in a folder so that apps can be sorted out as the user wishes his or her portable start menu should be. Ü
But seriously ... this modification would make a serious difference between using portable apps and PStart 2.11 by pegtop software (pegtop.net). I'm using both because PStart still has that customizing thing that Portable Apps couldn't offer. Hope you guys out there would give in to this wish of mine. Thank you very much and more power!

Is there a way with nsis to set windows path. Like in a batch file you would have

set var=path\to\folder

is there a way to do that using nsis??

Has there been discussion of environment variables? I know lots of programs ignore them, but some don't, and it might be helpful to do some things with them.

Will this copy the whole \2k\ dir into \bin\ dir

StrCpy $0 "$EXEDIR\App\GnuCash\orbitfix\2k" ;Path of copy file from
StrCpy $1 "$EXEDIR\App\GnuCash\bin" ;Path of copy file to
StrCpy $2 0 ; only 0 or 1, set 0 to overwrite file if it already exists
System::Call 'kernel32::CopyFile(t r0, t r1, b r2) l'
Pop $0 ; pops a bool. if overwrite is off and there is a file then error will be 1

if there something wrong with this code?? because its not poping up a msg box at all and im running xp, im not good with nsis yet so i though i might have messed up the if statement or something. GetWindowsVersion is a function i found in the manual.

Section "Main"

; Windows 2000 Fix
Call GetWindowsVersion
Pop $R0
!if "$R0" = "2000"
MessageBox MB_ICONEXCLAMATION|MB_OK "windows2k"
!endif
!if "$R0" = "XP"
MessageBox MB_ICONEXCLAMATION|MB_OK "windowsXP"
!endif

SectionEnd

I've got the start of the updates code for the PAM ready. It's still a long way from being finished (doesn't even check yet), but at least it's a start. Rather than being a generic solution for many servers, ala AMP, it only handles the PA site, which reduces the complexity.
Et, viola.

procedure TfrmMenu.GetUpdatesINI();
// Download the updates INI from the PortableApps.com server
// Acknowledgement: http://delphi.about.com/od/internetintranet/a/get_file_net.htm for the function
var
	remoteUpdates: TINIFile;
	remoteUpdatesPath: TString;
	localUpdatesPath: TString;
begin

HERE is a small tutorial to create your own PAM theme. the tutorial is for the original PAM and the PAM MOD themes (wich use the theme.ini).

have fun and greetz
NeoRame