Portable App Development

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?

Could we start implementing re-naming of folders to include file versions? It can be annoying having to open the application if you just want to see if it is up-to-date (like if you can't remember if you downloaded that update or not, etc).

Would be greatly appreciated, and I can't see it being much work...

Okay Tom Revell the original author of stickies has hosted my launcher for stickies. He included the app and said if you wanted to release it on this sight you could link to his sight for a direct download. The launcher lies here.

Okay...
I'm making a launcher for an app that happens to be using 4 different registry keys, and all of them are essential for the program to run. I've been looking at the NSIS script for 7-zip, but it only needs one key. My question is: How do I arrange the script when it is using more than one key? Here is the section I've been working with:

RegistryBackup:
		StrCmp $SECONDARYLAUNCH "true" LaunchAndExit
		;=== Backup the registry
		${registry::KeyExists} "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\7-zip-BackupBy7-ZipPortable" $R0
		StrCmp $R0 "0" RestoreTheKey

I have a request for when CommandPromptPortable is brought up to date. Currently it is impossible to enter additional parameters via ini or command line, only by using commandprompt.bat in Data\batch. This makes it difficult to use CommandPromptPortable from other Portable Apps. For instance with Perl Portable I want to be able to open up a command prompt with a /k parameter to perform a command or custom batch file. As it stands to do this I have to back up any existing commandprompt.bat and create my own temporary one, then swap them back out afterward.