PortableApps.com – Portable App Directory (Run-from-USB Software)

Quite a lot of people should know about Portable Apps, that they are versions of existing programs with wrappers/launchers to run off your USB Flash Drives. Well, for convenience, we’re posting about them here.

Some of the Coburn’s Domain staff even use Portable versions of PuTTY (SSH Client), Opera (Web Browser), Firefox, and media players like VLC Player (VideoLAN Client) for managing Coburn’s Domain content on the go.

While traditional programs require installation onto your computer’s system drive, PortableApps.com tries to work around this by offering to install it to your USB flash drive by default. After installation, the user just double clicks on the Launcher application, and the Portable version of the app will automatically be configured to save user data onto the USB Flash Drive, as saving data to the computer’s hard disk may be disabled (for example, the user is using a internet cafe PC).

The PortableApps version of the application looks and feels exactly the same as the normal version, however some applications (such as Portable Firefox) will run slower if the USB Flash Drive is busy reading and writing data.

You can find the PortableApps Website over at http://www.portableapps.com, at time of writing, they had just under 90 Portable Apps available for download.