Portable App Development

Okay, all this talk of using NSIS to make an app portable has got me intrigued. And then I saw the post about an NSIS Dev team and wondered what resources you've used to learn how to make an app portable using NSIS. I usually just dive into a new language and teach myself, but I thought I would ask this community if there are resources you've used to learn how to create portable apps.

I've done a very brief scan of the net on 'NSIS and portable apps' to look for 'how to' sites, but could not find any. I did notice that the Winamp.com NSIS forums look like a great place to get ideas and ask questions.

OK heres my idea.
What about a NSIS Dev Team?
And maybe we could get special titles on the forums
Then we could work together on projects

Portable Google Talk will no longer be supported or hosted. Please use Pidgin Portable or the online interface instead. I don't have a copy of it, so sorry for any inconvenience.

Rob Loach [Website]

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