DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - NOV 2015
PORTABLEAPPS.COM TO RUN PROGRAMS FROM A
FLASH DRIVE
©2015 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2015-11-11
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter,
and are posted on
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html where
there may be corrections or updates.
THE PORTABLEAPPS PLATFORM
There are many free computer programs useful
for family history and related computer tasks.
Some are "portable", that is, they will
run from a flash drive and don't need to be
installed on the computer. Portable
versions on a flash drive can be taken with
you to use on any Windows computer, e.g. at a
Family History Center. That way you can
use programs that you are familiar with that
are not on the FHC's computers. You
don't have to download and install them on the
FHC computers temporarily, even, which you
can't do now in most FHC's. And to run
them you don't have to be connected to the
Internet, but if you are running a browser
from a flash drive you need to be able to get
to the Internet, of course. Running
portable programs from a flash drive also has
the advantage that they don't leave traces or
pieces of the programs and/or data on the
FHC's computer. In this note I will
discuss a freeware program platform called
PORTABLEAPPS.COM which allows this. It
is available from http://portableapps.com/
. This website also includes over 300
completely free and legal programs that can be
put on the PORTABLEAPPS platform on the flash
drive. Their website says the following about
the platform and programs.
FLEXIBLE
Make every PC feel like your own / Use your
favorite software everywhere / Carry your
bookmarks and settings / Edit your documents,
photos and more
FREE
Free. No time limits. No catch. /
No registration required. Never was. /
No adware. No spyware. No malware. / OSI
Certified Open Source Software
This gives you an idea of what it does.
FEATURES OF PORTABLEAPPS
The Features page on their website gives more
information, such as that this platform can be
run from several locations; namely, a portable
device (flash drive), from the Cloud (that is,
from the Internet), or from a folder on your
own computer. It can be set up to work
the way you want and you are not locked into a
particular way of viewing and running
things. You can set up folders to
organize the programs into groups and it has a
"type-a-few-words" search to find and run the
program you are want. You can also
change the fonts, colors, format, etc.
It will even tell you which programs
need updating and update them for you, if you
want. The Apps tab link on the Home page
lists the more than 300 free and OpenSource
programs they already have and these are
organized into categories, so you can find the
ones you want to download. The list
includes many programs that I use regularly,
such as IrfanView, PhotoFilmStrip, Google
Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Audacity, VLC,
LibreOffice, OpenOffice, FoxIt Reader,
PDF-XChangeViewer, Sumatra PDF, 7-Zip, Ditto,
Duplicate Files Finder, Q-DIR, Revo
Uninstaller, WinDirStat, and WinMerge.
Well, you get the idea. In going
through their list I noticed several other
programs that I want to try. You can
sign up for their free monthly newsletter
listing the newest apps and information.
They even sell flash drives with all 300
programs already installed, so they run on any
Windows computer by just plugging the drive
in, but you can set up your own flash drive
with their platform and programs for free.
Under the Forums tab there are forums
for many of the popular programs with hundreds
of posts, questions, and answers. The
PORTABLEAPPS platform information says that it
will run on any version of Windows from 2000
on, so it will work on Windows XP, 7, 8, and
10, and it will automatically adjust for
64-bit Windows versions, if that's what the
computer has. Under the Support tab
there is information about how to add other
apps to your collection on the flash drive, so
you can include software other than the ones
they have. This will be discussed below.
INSTALLING PORTABLEAPPS TO A FLASH DRIVE
To install PORTABLEAPPS click on the Download
tab on the Home page of the website and
download it to your hard drive. Then
select the programs you want from the 300
listed, plug in a flash drive, run the setup
program, and tell it to install the programs
onto the flash drive. I selected 63 of
the 300 programs, including several large
ones, e.g. LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
The installation time to the flash drive
was more than an hour. You have to watch
the installation since on some of the programs
you need to click "Accept" to tell it you will
only use that program for personal, and not
commercial, use. The programs that don't
have this restriction install on your flash
drive without stopping. The final size
of all 63 programs on my flash drive is less
than 4 gigabytes, so you don't need a large
flash drive.
RUNNING PORTABLEAPPS
After installing PORTABLEAPPS on your flash
drive, to run the programs, insert the flash
drive into a Windows computer and when you see
the menu on your screen, click Start (on the
Menu, not the Windows Start button). If
it detects an Internet connection and any of
the programs needs updating, it gives you the
option of updating them right then. When
done updating, or as soon as you are ready,
click Apps > Refresh and it goes through
the files to update its list of all the
programs on the flash drive. To run a
program click on its name. For documents
that you write or screenshots that you save,
if you store them on the flash drive, they
will be there to read or edit next time you
run PORTABLEAPPS and you can copy them off
onto your own computer when you get home.
There are options on the Start menu to
update, and add or remove apps. At the
top of the PORTABLEAPPS window is a search box
that allows you to type any characters or
words and it immediately shows all programs
with those in the title. Clicking on All
Portable Apps (near the bottom) lists the
categories with all the flash drive apps in
their respective categories. In a
category list you can scroll down through all
the programs in it, but I can't find a way to
scroll down on the full list and you only see
the top 15 or 20 programs. However,
after you use a program, it is placed at the
top of the list, so you always see the most
recently used programs at the top and they are
no longer in alphabetical order.
Programs that you add that are not from
their 300 programs (see below) are categorized
under Other, but can be moved to a different
category by right-clicking on the title,
selecting Categories and then the one you want
it in.
ADDING OTHER PROGRAMS TO PORTABLEAPPS
On the Support page are instructions for
adding other programs to the platform --
see
http://portableapps.com/support/platform#addingotherapps .
It
points out that other programs may not be
completely portable, so they may leave
something behind on the computers you plug
into, unlike the programs already in
PortableApps. Also, the information will
not be backed up onto your flash drive when
you just use the platform backup option before
removing it, so be sure to save documents and
screenshots, etc., onto the flash drive before
you remove it. For programs that are
completely portable you could use them on a
flash drive without the PORTABLEAPPS platform,
but then you would have to check for and
download updates yourself. [As a side
note, for programs installed on my home
computer, i.e., non-portable ones, I use the
freeware program Glary Utilities to check and
update them.] To install a program not
already on their list just form a folder in
the PORTABLEAPPS folder on the flash drive and
copy the program and files into
it. After copying the files to the
flash drive, go to the PORTABLEAPPS menu and
click Apps > Refresh to add your new apps
to the list. I copied my program files
for EVERYTHING and FASTSTONE CAPTURE 5.3,
which I use all the time, over to the flash
drive and they seem to run fine in
PORTABLEAPPS. As I mentioned above,
other programs may not be fully portable and
may leave "pieces" or bits of data on the
computer you run them on, but this is not
usually a problem. You can set the
programs to save documents, screenshots, etc.,
right onto your flash drive, so you will
always have them available to work on again
and to copy to your home computer later.
CONCLUDING IDEAS
An idea that I haven't tried, but looks like
it would work, is to set up a browser, e.g.
Chrome, with all the extensions and added
programs to use with FamilySearch such as
TreeSeek, RecordSeek, RootsMapper, Print
Friendly, etc., so we could use it at a FHC,
even if these other Certified programs are not
on the computers there. Of course, to
use the browser to get to FamilySearch you
need to get to the Internet. I also
wonder if this would let us use commercial
programs that we own, like PowerPoint, to run
on the flash drive. I give lots of FH
presentations and running the programs that I
need from a flash drive would make it easy to
use a local computer and not have to bring my
own.
This is a useful tool for Family History since
there are many times when we need to use
computers other than our own and programs that
are not on those computers. If you try
PORTABLEAPPS, please give us your feedback and
suggestions.