Portable App Development

Hey everyone. after reading John's new update, i've taken it upon myself to create this thread. I think it would be a good idea to have a new one of these before each round of dev releases.

What apps do you think should be released in the next round of Developer releases? Among other things, keep in mind how useful the app would be portable and how popular it is. The apps also need to be ready enough to move to Pre-Release. The last round had 5 releases so i'm gonna go ahead and say list 5 and order them, with #1 being the most important.

Have any Portable Apps been created that would run under Windows 95b?

I have an old laptop that I can use a Compact Flash Card in a PCMCIA Slot with an adapter. It would be great if I could run Apps from that Flash Card because the internal RAM is sparse.

I'm just trying to ReUse the old laptop instead of chucking it out, as has been suggested many times.

R William

The current PortableApps.com Format Specification is available here:
https://portableapps.com/development/portableapps.com_format

Ok, I'm posting a quick outline for comment as the full spec isn't done yet and I'd like to get some more input from the community. Here are just the basics. Nothing too fancy. Please offer up any comments or suggestions. Thanks!

PortableApps.com Format Specification: Draft 4 (2009-02-12)

1. DIRECTORY LAYOUT

Would it be acceptable for the launcher to be written from scatch and still by made offical?

thanks

i understand why we can't post most freeware apps here, because their license makes it illegal to modify them. but why can't we post freeware apps that have more flexible licenses to allow repackaging? the only reason we don't have official freeware apps is because of hosting, so if we have our own hosting, then we should be able to post them on the forums.

The standard WinSCP distribution includes file winscp.com, a command-line interface to the WinSCP.exe executable. It's basically a command-line sftp client. The current portable version doesn't include winscp.com, could it be added to the next PAF version?
WinSCP.exe needs to be running already for winscp.com to work. From my limited testing, it doesn't seem to leave anything in the registry.
More info here http://winscp.net/eng/docs/scripting

I made some themes for the orginal PAM.
Here you'll find them:

Name

Metallic Theme Set

PAM-Version

PAM 1.1 Beta4

Size

406 * 573 pix

Preview & Download

I like them.

I'm working on improving the Winamp launcher, really the only thing left to do is make the media library portable. The issue is that the media library uses absolute paths and is stored in a .dat file. Is there a way in NSIS to find B:, C:, E: or whatever the path may be and replace it with the drive letter of the flash drive? I know you can do a find and replace, but will this work in a .dat file? Also, since the initial drive letter of the path can be anything, how would I do the find and replace for it? Thanks.

Not sure if this is the correct location for this post...
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I can't find it in the forum: is there a way to automatically start an app as soon as the PortableApps menu is started? I constantly use Keepass during the day, so it would be nice to have it start together with the PA Menu. Sort of like the startup folder in windows...

Could anyone please tell me how to redirect
"C:\Documents and Settings\HOME PC\Application Data\Artweaver" using nsis? because I want those settings to be stored in the "Data" directory of the app, which I am trying to make portable.

thx in advance

edit: because subject was not very clear

Edit 2: I am trying to make my question clearer: how does a portable app handle the program which writes to "application data"? and how does it delete them and then get them to the "data" directory on the USB or so? could someone please show me the code?