October 29, 2009

If you travel from city to city or office to office and don’t want to lug your laptop everywhere you go, you might be interested in a concept called portable applications.

Portable applications are versions of software you may use on your desktop or laptop computer that can be stored on your iPod or any removable media, such as a flashdrive and launched on any compatible computer.

The obvious advantage to setting up and carrying around a full suite of applications on your iPod of flashdrive is that you have the ultimate portability. However, there’s another very good reason. If you use another machine to do work, most everything you’ve done leaves a trail on that machine (including password and other sensitive data.)

In addition, your portable applications can be preconfigured with all of your settings, such as bookmarks, so you can plug your portable version of Firefox into a compatible machine (with or without a resident copy of Firefox) and launch your browser with your familiar settings ready to go. Or, you can fire up your version Mail on a borrowed Mac and have all your contact information ready to go. (Portable applications are not cross compatible – Mac versions for Macs and PC versions for PCs.)

The following is what I consider an essential list of portable applications. Every business traveler should download, set-up, and store these on a flash drive or iPod just in case you ever show up for that huge presentation and realize your laptop is sitting on the A-train headed to Poughkeepsie.

Firefox
The browser of choice for many these days

Firefox (Mac) 

Open Office – an open source suite of tools that can be used to create, open, and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations created in Microsoft Office and other office tools.

Open Office (Mac)

Sunbird – calendar and task application built on the Mozilla Firefox platform

Sunbird (Mac)

Thunderbird- email application built on the Mozilla Firefox platform

Thunderbird (Mac)  

Portable versions of Mac default software– Safari, iCal, Address Book, and Mail

Notepad + + - Full featured text editor

Skype– use your Skype set-up on the go

Miranda IM – cross protocol IM client for chat on multiple systems

Adium IM (Mac)

7Zip – File compression and unpacking

Filezilla – Full featured FTP client

Cyberduck (Mac)

MuPDF Reader

(Mac and PC versions) – Open and edit PDF files

FastStone Photo Resizer – Simple image editor, resize, crop and retouch images

Portable Gimp (Mac)

Mojopac – Allows your to clone your PC and take your entire desktop with you

Wikipedia list of portable apps -  comprehensive list of portable applications

Great list of mac apps 

Image Credit: purplelime

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