Portable App Development

WARNING: Portable WackGet will no longer be hosted or supported. Use DownThemAll Firefox extension instead.

I noticed that WackGet seemed to be quite a popular program here on the boards when it came to download managers. The problem is that it isn't truly portable, it saves its settings to the registery. This is when I decided to do up Portable WackGet.

This mainly directed at John but I'd be interested in other points of view, too. Why the use of NSIS?

I was interested in making a few tweaks of some of the portable apps I've downloaded so I downloaded NSIS. This lead me to discover that it's really for building installation scripts. As such it seems it might be somewhat limiting when trying to use it more as a general purpose language. Comments?

I am currently making a portable version of Apache for windows, and need to replace a single line of text in every file with a different one. I was wondering what the best way to do this would be? I'm trying to do it in Batch, but it's not weorking very well.

I am currently in the development stages (alpha) of my START menu.
Name: START (Start The Apps Real fasT)
Purpose: To have a fast, simple start menu.
Background: START, or Start The Apps Real fasT, is my attempt at a fully open source Start menu to rival closed source apps like PStart. The advantages of having it open source is that it will (possibly (hopefully)) be fully customisable. Another advantage is that it will be very small.

After running into a problem with legalities when working on Portable Skype, I checked my wishlist of open-source software programs that I wanted to be portable, I found VideoLAN. Now although VideoLAN can run from a USB key without problems, it sadly isn't truly portable as it saves its configuration to:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\vlc\vlcrc

So in order to prove that I could make a valid portable application, I took on the challenge of making Portable VideoLAN. This included finding a way to not only have the configuration save to a seperate location, but also wrap it up into a nice easy Portable Apps solution. Here is the aftermath:

WARNING: Portable Skype will no longer be supported or hosted. You'll have to follow some instructions in the comments to reproduce it. In the mean time though, you can download an archived version of it here.

I always wanted to try my hand out with NSIS scripting and when John released Portable Miranda, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to jump into it with a Portable Skype.

I tried to just copy & paste all the files to my USB drive, but that didn't work. I though I had read that there would be a tutorial released on how to create a portable app? This is a legal version of Photoshop, and the way I interpret the user agreement is that I can only install in one place, so if I install to my USB drive, I don't violate anything.

-pyoung09259

Considering that most of the Portable Apps application suites use NSIS to compile the portable application wrapper, would it make sense to make HM NIS Edit portable...

Rob Loach [Website] [Projects]

I made a nice little .vbs script that can do the following:

- Set an environmental variable to the drive letter of your portable drive, so you can use programs/shortcuts that need an absolute path by changing the drive letter to %portabledrive%:

- Creates a shortcut in the computer's My Documents folder to a directory on your portable drive, so you can just click on it as a folder in most open/save dialogue boxes. It removes it when you remove the drive.

- Starts PStart (or whatever you change it to)

- Can start a program before/after/at the same time as running pstart.

- Safely dismounts the drive (if you are an administrator on the computer) when you close the menu program.

UPDATE 4/17/2006: This has been released:
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/chat/portable_miranda

I've posted a test release of Portable Miranda. Miranda is actually quite portable as it is. (it saves its profiles to its exe directory by default, which is nice) My version really only has a couple differences:

1. Total install size is dropped from 2.70MB to 1.14MB
2. The profiles directory is split out by default and the launcher allows you the same flexibility in placement as with Portable Firefox, Portable Gaim, etc... so you can have your settings in a seperate 'settings' directory by default... or you can drop Portable Miranda into the same directory structure of the Portable Apps Suite -- a PortableApps directory with an Apps and Data directory within -- and have it work there as well (with the miranda EXE in Apps and the profiles within Data).