portableapps.com always felt like a hack for me. It uses NDIS (or
some other acronym) wrapper to hack around the folders tricking the
enclosed executable to think it is writting to one place when it is
actually writting to someplace else like the removable media folder.
This solves some issues but it brings other problems.
Let us go to the important problems (IMHO):
* Removable media is slow. If your app does a lot of file juggling or
is very disk based, you'll see performance penalty, specially if
you're using cheap no brand pendrives.
* Limited writting life of flash drives. You can't write on them
forever, they have a limit and they will fail. I don't think a
pendrive can stand like a year of heavy use but some application that
access the disk too much. I can't quote on the limits but they exist.
Good portable apps are designed to be portable from the start, not
hacked afterward with some tricky folder-phantomizing-tool. Portable
apps should load all data they need and run from RAM without touching
the disk, or only touching the disk when it needs to save permanent
data. This will not only save your precious pendrive but also run way
faster than some disk happy tool.
And if you're designing your app to be portable from the start, you
don't need U3. You can build your own launcher. You can join the U4
yahoo group and help the efforts. U3 good side is not the technology
but the marketing, it gave apps exposure and a portal that the user
could navigate and find stuff. I don't like portableapps.com but it
gives you exposure and lots of users, from a marketing standpoint it
is cool, from a tech standpoint it feels like a hack to me.
also, their portableapps menu never worked on win98 or win2000 for me.
andre
That's a good question. I would imagine RunRev has a U3 version,
and if they've done that much work it's far easier to make one
that'll run on any flash drive. I couldn't find either on the
Download page, though -- anyone know if that's in the works?
For apps that are known to be portable, the directory at
PortableApps.com is a good starting point:
<http://portableapps.com/apps>
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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