PaulSpoerry.com

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind!

I personally have a large memory card on my Windows Mobile phone… so I can use something that I always have with me anyway as a way to carry around software. Pretty handy…

So let’s start with the mac daddy, the PortableApps Suite:

PortableApps.com Suite™ is a complete collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, audio player, sudoku game, password manager, PDF reader, minesweeper clone, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.

All versions of the PortableApps.com Suite include the integrated PortableApps.com Menu (pictured at right) and the PortableApps.com Backup utility along with a set of custom icons, an autoplay configuration, folders and a quick start shortcut. In addition, the packages include:

• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (web browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition (email)
• Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition (calendar/tasks)
• ClamWin Portable (antivirus)
• Pidgin Portable (instant messaging)
• Sumatra PDF Portable (PDF reader
• KeePass Password Safe Portable (password manager)
• Sudoku Portable (game)
• Mines-Perfect Portable (game)
• CoolPlayer+ Portable (audio player)
• OpenOffice.org Portable* (office suite)
  - Writer (word processor)
  - Calc (spreadsheet)
  - Impress (presentations)
  - Base (database utility)
  - Draw (drawing)

*Note: The Light Suite includes AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable.

Portable apps doesn’t have it all… so let’s look at some of the rest:

Most other portable software can be found at PortableFreeware. While most people can get away with the PortableApps Suite there are a few things missing that I consider crucial to  your portable arsenal.

• Truecrypt - TrueCrypt creates virtual encrypted disks within a file and mount them as a real disk. It supports a full range of encryption algorithms, including AES-256, which is used within the government for information as high up as Top Secret classification.
• NotePad++ – Notepad++ is one of the few source code text editors that supports folding. In addition, it features multi-language syntax highlighting, auto-completion, regular expression search/replace, macro recording and playback etc. This is my preferred FREE text editor, it’s fast, light, and easy to use. And let’s face it… how often do you  really need a full blown Word Processor when on the run. If you’ll need one, plan ahead and take your laptop!
• CCleaner – CCleaner is a system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system and cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally, and most importantly to me, it contains a fully featured registry cleaner.
• uTorrent – µTorrent is a small BitTorrent client that uses very little system resources. This is my favorite BitTorrent client for the desktop, and while I wouldn’t suggest you run it full time from a portable USB device it could be handy in a pinch if you needed to grab something that requires a torrent download.
• Foxit Reader Portable – Ok look, PDF’s suck. I hate them… seriously. More than that I hate Acrobat Reader since it’s a huge bloated application that takes forever to launch even on a fully modern PC. Having said that, there’s a LOT of PDF’s out there. Enter Foxt Reader which is a small and fast PDF viewer that is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6. Don’t think you’re limited to only the portable version, there is also a desktop version… ditch Acrobat for good!
• 7-Zip – Oddly absent from the portableApps Suite is a compression utility. 7-Zip is a file archiver that supports just about every compression format you can think of.
• FileZilla – A really good portable FTP client.

Just a note that most all of these portable apps can be integrated right into the PortableApps suite menu. The PortableApps.com Menu can automatically add apps in PortableApps.com Format. Just download the file you’d like to add (like FileZilla Portable, for instance). Then, in PortableApps.com Menu, click Options – Add a New App – Install and then select the FileZilla Portable .paf.exe file you just downloaded. The PortableApps.com Menu will automatically install it to the proper location for you.

SixRevisions has posted an article on 12 Excellent Free Text Editors for Coders. For the record, I don’t actually use a “free” editor for my primary development. However, since I do web development I’ll end up on a remote session with clients and need to debug something at their location… installing Visual Studio isn’t an option. Luckily, there are some really good free editors and my favorite one ends up first on the list.

You can make writing code as complicated as you want, but at the end of the day, all you really need is your favorite, trusty text editor. You can use a simple one like Microsoft’s Notepad, but oftentimes it’s helpful to have a text editor that has syntax highlighting/coloring, support for multiple languages, a robust find and replace feature, and other features and options that make writing code just a tad bit easier.

NOTEPAD++

(Windows)

NOTEPAD++ is the premier replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad. It has an auto-completion feature (for most supported languages) that guesses what you’re trying to write, a tabbed interface which is great for working with multiple files without cluttering your task bar, a powerful RegEx find-and-replace feature, code folding, support for a large array of languages (even Assembler!) and much more. These are just some of the features that make NOTEPAD++ my personal default text editor.

Check out the rest here!

Power users need power utilities, and Windows’ default system programs barely get the job done. Over time third-party developers have stepped and build superior replacements to programs like Notepad, Paint, Windows Explorer and the Command Prompt. Get the simple jobs done smarter, faster and more efficiently with these free utitlites

read more | digg story

CyberNet offers a simple tweak for increasing the size of the Alt-Tab thumbnail previews in Vista:

One of Vista’s features that I use all of the time is the new Alt-Tab for switching between applications. Unlike Windows XP, Vista actually shows thumbnails for each application that you are running so that it is easier to identify what you’re looking for. And they just aren’t screenshots either like a lot of the imitators in XP, instead they show live previews of the application. Overall, it is just really nice.

The above is what the default Alt-Tab looks like in Windows Vista, and if you click on the image you’ll see the full-size version. That’s on a 1920×1200 screen, which makes it obvious that it doesn’t take up the whole width of the screen. Unfortunately Microsoft did not scale the width of the Alt-Tab based upon the size of the monitor.

If I’m running Vista on a monitor capable of 1920×1200, I want to utilize the space available. And as it stands, Alt-Tab shows 7 previews in a row before it creates a new row. I’d rather leave that number alone and have it make the thumbnails bigger when I have a larger resolution available.

That’s when I came across this site which gives some registry settings that you can modify to change the width of each thumbnail, and ultimately the size of the Alt-Tab display. To change the size just download this registry file, and after it is on your computer, right-click on it and select Merge. This will import it into your registry using the values I’ve specified in the file (optimized for displays that are 1680×1050).

The first thing you might want to do before Merging the file is to open it in Notepad (or any text editor) and adjust the MaxThumbSizePx to match something close to your resolution.

1024×768: MaxThumbSizePx = 00000078
1280×1024: MaxThumbSizePx = 0000009E
1680×1050: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000d2
1920×1200: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000f5

You do not need to restart your computer to see the changes, they should be instant. This is what the end result looks like on my 1920×1200 monitor (yeah, compare this to the screenshot above):

If you don’t like how it looks, and don’t want to mess around with it, you can always revert back to the old Vista Alt-Tab dimensions by removing the following “folder” from the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Windows’
CurrentVersion’Explorer’AltTab

That will delete all of the settings that you just entered in, and the Alt-Tab appearance will revert back to how it was previous to importing the values into the registry. If you wanted to mess with all of the values, it might be easier to open the registry editor, findi the location above, and edit the values there since you can enter them in as a normal decimal number: