Portable Apps allows you to entry all of your go-to apps anyplace, anytime—no matter whether or not you might be utilizing your personal laptop or not.
With greater than 400 apps, 980 million downloads, and obtainable in 55 languages, Portable Apps permits you to entry your favorites through a USB flash drive, a cloud folder, or simply about any moveable storage machine. Portable Apps is like having your laptop with out having your laptop.
Portable Apps is launched below the GPL and MIT licenses, and it’s suitable with Windows XP by way of 10, or Linux and MacOS through Wine or CrossOver. Developed by John T. Haller, a pc science main at Binghamton University and the developer of Portable Firefox, Portable Apps launched in November 2006 and has been in improvement since 2004. The present model, 15.zero.2, was launched on May 17, 2018. Plus, Portable Apps is supported by 200 volunteers and 220,000 neighborhood members.
Portable Apps to the rescue
Portable Apps was a lifesaver for me after I agreed to show a graphic design class for prime schoolers at St. Lawrence University final 12 months. As I defined in a previous article, I used to be not allowed to put in any apps on the college’s Windows computer systems and wanted a technique to share sure ones with the scholars—particularly GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus.
With the primary day of sophistication rapidly approaching, I searched for tactics to share the magic of open supply graphic design with my college students and rediscovered Portable Apps. I had been briefly launched to it in a pc forensics courses two years beforehand, the place we used Portable Firefox, so I knew there needed to be a technique to do it. And, due to open supply software program, there’s.
To share Portable Apps with my college students, I bought USB flash drives and had the college’s brand imprinted on them. The college students obtained to maintain these branded Portable App flash drives after the category ended.
I copied Portable Apps over to every pupil’s flash drive from the grasp flash drive. The course of was very sluggish, and I attempted reformatting the drives between FAT and NTSF, however that made little distinction. Using my open supply apps and the Adobe Suite, which was already put in on the computer systems, I used to be capable of educate my college students graphic design, evaluating how open supply apps and Adobe apps labored in a lot the identical method.
Part of the educating course of concerned having the scholars discover and set up their very own moveable apps on their flash drives. The college students selected their very own apps to put in, and the preferred alternative was PokerTH Portable.
What’s your kind?
Fonts are, after all, an integral a part of all apps. Portable Apps helps the set up and use of normal font codecs. As the web site says:
The Platform helps the power to take normal font recordsdata (TTF, OTF, and so on.) with you and use them on any laptop with out the necessity to set up them into Windows. Just copy the font recordsdata you would like obtainable to the X:PortableAppsPortableApps.comDataFonts listing in a regular platform setup.
Portable Apps is obtainable by way of its web site, PortableApps.com, and on SourceForge. John Haller’s web site, Rare Ideas, encourages individuals to share their very own concepts and tasks.