Singapore Law Blog

Thanks to portable applications that can be stored on USB Flash drives, you can now make any PC your own. The chance to stumble across a product or service that has been missed by many and yet has the potential to shake-up conventional wisdom, is one of the benefits of writing a blod like this. I was like a kid rubbing my hands in anticipation after discovering PortableApps.com.

Portable Apps are mainstream open source Windows applications that have been repackaged to fit into a USB drive, ie portable. The application's code and data storage requirements have been restructured to make it possible to execute them from a portable media source with little or no footprint on the hosting PC.

John Haller, the godfather of the portable apps movement, has produced portable Windows versions of some of the best-known open source projects: the OpenOffice suite, Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and quite a few others. Careful selection will allow you to fit the apps into a 512 MB USB Drive easily.

You can set up the portable Firefox browser with all your bookmarks, let the portable Thunderbird e-mail client download your mail messages and work on your documents with OpenOffice. Use all this to go at a public computer, then when you’re done, just eject the USB drive to remove all traces of your activities.

Because OpenOffice’s Impress presentation module happily works with PowerPoint documents, with the portable version of OpenOffice and your presentation, you can take your USB drive into any room with a Windows computer and show your presentation, whether there’s a compatible installation of PowerPoint on the computer or not. That is the power of PortableApps.