Portable App Development

I had an idea a while back and have been surprised not to find anyone else having the same. The quick summary:

Run a program in a "sandbox", similar to the Linux fakeroot tool, intercepting all accesses and changes to files, registry, etc., redirecting them to a different location.

It should be clear how this approach could make almost any application portable: simply run its installer in the sandbox, redirecting to your USB key.

There are bunches of other uses for this too, though: keep an easy archive of a clean, already set-up copy of an app; prevent two apps from possibly conflicting with each other; quickly sharing complex setups (e.g. to show the existance of a certain bug); easily moving infrequently-used apps off of the main disk... and finally, if locked down enough... run a questionable app (or web browser) in a sandbox where it couldn't mess with anything else. (chroot for Windows.)

Hello everyone,

For some reasons, I have to bookmark a folder (from my usb key where portable firefox is). I have thought that these case was managed by the launcher but apparently not.
Is it possible that the launcher could manage these case (every local url in the bookmark that point to the same disk where portable firefox is) ?

Thanks for your great job !

Is there any chance to develop a version in Spanish Language?

I'm willing to help with translations if necesary.

I didn't find a mention of this so here it is.

For those of us using Adium on Mac, you can make the program a portable app by editing a few lines in the application bundle.

UPDATE: Skype Portable has been released!

Over on the Request Apps Forum, a question quickly led to a discussion about crafting a Portable version of Skype. Being careful to not modify things to the point of violating the user agreement, why don't we try to iron out a solution on this forum?

What command can I put in a batch to import a registry key; and then for a 2nd batch, how would i remove that certain key

I would like to present my launcher: ASuite 1.0. ASuite 1.0 is a simple and light launcher with 15 software (total size 8MB approximately) included.

However new version of ASuite is in work in progress.

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Can you make a launcher detects all portable programs (from PortableApps.com) and lists it? That would be easier and would be used in future projects?

And can you tell me what kind of programming language and tools do you use. I know some PHP but making programs will be cool too
Maybe I make the launcher :cool:

hey here is an idea i just got:

many archive programs like winrar allow for extracting from the command line instead of a GUI. maybe a good way to save space would be to compress all programs with such a program then have executables that would just say which files to extract and then open the main program + assosiated files. that would save a lot of space if you could compress programs like portable firefox and only unpackem when you needed to (do understand that it would take longer to open up apps). does that sound like a good idea or should i put my mind to other stuff?

I don't know about the rest of you, but sometimes I have (almost) lost my USB drive. When I thought I lost it, I began wondering what a good idea it would be if there was a way to encrypt the drive, so that no one else can use it, and since my name and address is already on it, they might return it to me. I know this is probably really hard, since you can just reformat the disk, but I've seen software like this on some USB drives (really expensive though), so it should be possible to create a free one right? Comments/ideas/suggestion, I'm all ears. It would be really nice if someone could crea