Portable App Development

I want to learn how to make portable apps for personal use and I thought I would start with Autoruns. This app only needs to set these registry entries...

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; autoruns
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sysinternals\AutoRuns]
"EulaAccepted"=dword:00000001
"onlinesearchcommand"="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="
"shownomicrosoft"=dword:00000001

I read Creating A Portable App: A Guerilla Field Guide but I don't understand this section:

Become familiar with the launchers available. For instance:

I am working on Snarl, it has quite a few registry entries that are essential for the program. Not quite sure how I can copy them and get them to load with the launch with the app/ I HAVE read the launcher manual but still a bit confused. Do I have to do a registry write for each entry?

Here is a paste of the keys I believe need to be written.
http://tinypaste.com/9249a
Any help appreciated, or maybe this is too complex to go portable? If so I would appreciate knowing that as well.

OK Looking at Snarl as a portable app. It is written in VB6. Problem I have is that it stores files in APPDATA upon install. I copied them out and tried using PA Launcher to move the files back and forth. It only moves a few of files ( Using directories move). Now If I manually copy files all is good, but if I let the launcher do it it does not load all the files and then creates a default directory without all bells and whistles? Any ideas? BTW I am in contact with author who may be making a command line switch in a future build so the locations of hte files can be switched.

I packaged up SQLyog using the PA launcher and installer packages. It works fine, uses the config directory within the package thanks to the -dir command line option, everything seems exactly the way it should... except for the complete lack of action if I try to launch it from the PA menu. The menu vanishes like it does for any other app, but SQLyog will not run. I can't find any kind of error logging. The icon looks good, everything else seems fine, the only steps I skipped are documentation and a splash screen.

Any ideas?

Hello there. I have an issue with VLCPortable wanting to rebuild the font cache every time it's launched. This to me is undesirable behavior, and to be avoided. The new VLC 1.1.0 is creating a file xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-i386.cache-2 in $Appdata/vlc. The x's there appear to be a random string generated some how from what it was able to build. I think I've found where to copy this file in VLCPortable.nsi but need to figure out how to express wildcards for the file as the actual file name is unknown.

Has any tried to create a portable launcher for Google SketchUp?

I've looked through the forums and seen some old discussions about it, but it looks like it was abandoned because it wasn't open source. I figured that now that we have some freeware programs and the installer is able to download installers and extract them that it would be worth another look.

If no one has tried it, I might give it a stab. I've not played the the download capabilities of the installer yet.

Hey all.
Heres a hard one for you.
I have a software package in which you may create sticky notes. This is stored on the desktop as Stickynotexxxxxxxxx (x being numbers). However it always starts with stickynotes and is always on the desktop. How would I go about copying them to the portable device (maybe under Data\sticky or something like that)?

All help appreciated.

Shane Thompson

Hello everybody!

I am the author of a few open-source applications... one of them is Don't Panic! (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dont-panic/). Development has stopped for one and a half years (until September last year). I restarted work on it and today I noticed somebody put an older version of my software for testing. (back in 2008)

I realize that admin privileges are probably required to run this program, but that doesn't mean that you don't want the program that unlocks your dirty pictures, passwords, and sensitive legal documents to be on your USB drive. I certainly want to make it tougher for any individual to find out what program I used to create a giant random hidden encrypted file. Why give anyone the suspicion when they see it in your list of programs? Plus, admin access is sometimes as easy as Safe Mode.

This isn't the first time I noticed it, but I was able to fix this problem before.
Look at this image.

The installer freezes up like that sometimes and it doesn't ever pick up again. It just stays like that. Normally, when that happens, I kill the process makensis.exe and exit out of everything thats open and recompile again. That usually works. with 2.0.2 though, its not working. I noticed that mainly happens with larger apps.