Portable App Development

I have some applications that I want to make portable (Mainly Maple - a symbolic algebra package). They currently run fine off of my flash drive with no modification, but they are writing to registry and using various dlls etc. Will a launcher using NSIS be enough to get this working at a simple level?
Will just deleting all the registry keys it makes at the end work?

In a launcher I found on these forums for CCleaner, the launcher also registers and unregisters all the dll files associated with the program - do I need to do this to make it portable?

In this section of code,

CheckRunning:

I just wrote up a short batch script that uses 7zip's encryption to pack up portablefirefox's data folder. Since running firefox from the USB gives such a perfomance hit, my script basically copies the portablefirefox folder to c:\temp & extracts the data folder. When I'm done browsing, I tell it to pack up the data folder back to my thumb drive & delete everything else. It can use a keyfile, or a manual password as I want it to.

I imagine such a thing would be easy to officially implement. It's only a 10 line script which anybody with a bit of programming experience could do. I can post it here if anyone wants it.

Yo,

The other day I stumbled on an article by a guy named j44xm that describes how you can use batch files and Window's command-line registry editor (reg.exe) to make ALL SORTS of apps portable. (Here's a link to the article).

I took his original idea and expanded on it to create compiled, stand-alone launchers for some apps I had lying around, and it seems to work flawlessly. I've only tried some small apps but I'd like to move-on to bigger things like Nero and Photoshop/Illustrator. I thought I'd share my progess so far though

Hey Gaim 2.0 Beta 4 came out, is it going to be available in portable form?

I have a bunch of executable apps, which I used to think were completely portable, but after running regcleaner, i see that they leave behind traces. What's the easiest way to turn these exe's portable? and how can I make a-squared hijack free 2.0 portable, because it leaves traces too?

I've posted the first test of a fully Vista-compatible launcher. NSIS just added support for the manifest files required by Vista yesterday, so I created a new Firefox Portable launcher using this new feature. This should prevent both the elevated privileges required prompt on launch and the application failed to complete on exit. I'd like some other folks with Vista to test this out before I incorporate it into the next release.

1. Grab a copy of Firefox Portable (either 1.5.0.7 or 2.0 RC3) and install it somewhere. (Don't worry that the Firefox Portable setup requires elevated privs... this will be changing. If you're on a limited account, grab the zip file)

Hi I'm just thinking of creating something let's call it a "Portable Application Creator" based on NSIS.

This should be an installer that contains the Portable Launcher and it's sources.
It should create the necessary directory structure whereever you want.

It also copies the files necessary for the application into the appropriate directory.

This means: The user would have to install/download the application and extract it. Then he should provide the base directory to the creator. Thena ll fiel should be copied together with the portable launcher into a predefined directory structure.

Hi,

UPX is awesome. Extracting .jar files and recompressing them at ultra compressions is awesome, but is there any way to script this to reduce manual labour?

It would be nice to select a folder and have every .exe, .dll and .jar inside it and recursively compressed...

Has anyone made any attempt to do this?

Rich

Hi everyone,

Just thought i'd post here that i've managed to make a portable version of eyeBeam 1.5.6.1, the VOiP software (http://counterpath.com/) using Klonk's fantastic "Portable Application Template 1.3". The only thing it leaves behind are two empty folders in $profile/Local Settings/Application Data; CounterPath\RegNow Enhanced. If anyone is intrested i can post the .nsi

I am thinking of going through Portable XAMPP Lite and deleting all the images. I'm pretty sure that would reduce the file size a great deal. The trouble is, if I did that, I'm not sure certain parts of it (like phpMyAdmin possibly) will still work, or whether I will still be able to actually navigate those parts that use the images if I need to later.

The reason for wanting it even smaller is because I have a really small flash drive and it barely fits on there - and I would like to be able to put more stuff on there. (I am planning to buy a bigger one soon, but still, I'd like to have thi