PortableApps.com is a website offering free applications for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

that have been specially packaged for portability. These

portable application A portable application (portable app), sometimes also called standalone, is a program designed to read and write its configuration settings into an accessible folder in the computer, usually in the folder where the portable application can be f ...

s are intended to be used from removable media such as

USB flash drives A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since first ...

. User data is stored in a subfolder, allowing the user to upgrade or move the software without affecting the data. To remove the software, a user can simply delete the main folder. The site was founded by John T. Haller and includes contributions from over 100 people, including developers, designers and translators.

History

The project started out as a portable version of

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and a ...

in March 2004. John T. Haller then expanded the project to include

Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The project s ...

and

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

. The

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

group of portable programs outgrew Haller's personal website and he moved it to a community site, PortableApps.com. The site currently hosts various projects created by forum members. The site is also used for bug reporting and suggestions. Some PortableApps distributions are hosted on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

Format

Application installers designed for use with the PortableApps.com menu follow the convention of using filenames ending in a extension, include

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

documentation and store data in the Data directory. Installers intended for use with the PortableApps.com menu can be either NSIS installers, generated with the PortableApps.com Installer, or compressed archives with self extractors. They can also be a custom Windows executable. The majority of applications can run on most computers with or later. Many apps will also run under

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems. Older versions of many apps support Windows 95/98/Me, but no new releases support these systems.

PortableApps.com Launcher

The PortableApps.com Launcher (also known as PAL) is used to make applications portable by handling path redirection, environment variable changes, file and directory movement, configuration file path updates and similar changes, as configured. The PortableApps.com Launcher allows software to be made portable without the need to write custom code or make changes to the base application. While some of the software packages released on PortableApps.com currently still contain their own custom launchers, the PortableApps.com Launcher is used in all new apps released. The installers are made with

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) is a script-driven installer authoring tool for Microsoft Windows backed by Nullsoft, the creators of Winamp. NSIS is released under a combination of free software licenses, primarily the zlib license. It ...

References

External links

* {{Official website Computing websites Free software distributions Portable software Application launchers Portable software suites

History

Format

PortableApps.com Launcher

See also

References

External links