100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick for Win and Mac

[saebrtooth]

100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick for Win and Mac

For Windows and Mac users, portable computing is even more portable when you only need to carry just use a usb drive.

This stuff can be installed on any portable drive, i.e. USB thumbdrive, PDA or an iPod. You can use them at work, school, or any other place where you can plugin your device. Check them out, you can either scroll-down for relevant category, i.e office software, email tools, messengers, games, etc. or get a ‘all-in-one’ package (all essential tools) . While there are more apps for windows users, I tried to include a mac version for each essential tool. All free. Enjoy!

What is a portable program ? : A portable program is a piece of software that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any other computer. It can be your email program, your browser, system recovery tools or even an operating system. The coolest part about it, is that all of your data and settings are always stored on a thumbdrive so when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

1. Portable Office Software
2. Portable Email/Calendar/ToDo Programs
3. Portable Text and Voice Messengers
4. Portable Media Tools (Audio / Video)
5. Portable Graphics Viewers and Image Editors
6. Portable Browsers and Web Tools (FTP, Feedreaders, Torrent clients…)
7. Portable Security Software
8. Portable Games
9. Other Portable Utilities
10. Portable Developer Tools (Techies Only)
11. All-In-One Packages
12. Portable Operating Systems (’HowTo’ Articles)
13. USB ThumDrive Tips

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/portable-software-usb/

[Renk]

Looks like you forgot to give some links

I like portable apps, for the reasons you wrote. It's great to bypass the window install processes, with their multiple registry entries.

Here are 2 links I have found:

The Portable Freeware Collection - Latest entries

PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives

[dreamer]

I am too a fan of portable apps.
most of the stuff above is pretty useless but there are pretty great stuff too.
for example, I've used over 2 years the portable version of Photoshop CS (77MB) - no install no nothing and works flawlessly.
now moved to CS3 portable with ~80MB too - also working good.

although there ARE softwares that give you the option to download an installer and a zip file with the content.

[anon]

I love portables too, they make life much easier when you have to work with several different computers every day. But I use self-made ones, you have more control over what you want to include and how the program reacts - for example, my portable Opera only has the necessary files, loads the SSL version of SB-I after being run, and doesn't write almost everything to disk.

[dreamer]

is there an easy way of making your own? or is it just a matter of rarring / copying the files?

[anon]

It's easy, you can do it with WinRAR. Create an SFX archive that'll extract itself silently to the temp folder, and then run the main program. Optionally you can make that a batch file that will run the program, and then delete all traces of it (registry, prefetch, etc.) upon closing it.

[dreamer]

and to know which registery keys have changed you can use "Registery Monitor" aka regmon - great tool!

[Instab]

100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick for Win and Mac

For Windows and Mac users, portable computing is even more portable when you only need to carry just use a usb drive.

on osx almost any app is portable by default