Portable Apps and You

Dan K — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:38:33 GMT

Well I've seen these about thirty times now, tried them once or twice, but now that I am doing a little more work with my side company, I've found this great tool for becoming a bit more mobile. Check out the suite here. You can run Open Office from a USB drive. Never be without the ability to open word, excel, access or powerpoint files again. I recommend trying the initial suite on that extra USB drive you have laying around for starters, then check out the whole apps list. Adding more portable apps from the site to your stick is as easy as pie. From the list you can make sure you will never be without a to open PDF, or a .ZIP RAR, TAR, and other popular compressed file formats, or connect to a needed FTP site. There are dozens of others, ranging from dev tools(a pretty good front-page clone) to utilities (use eraser to completely wipe info from a hard disk). There is also a portable version of Firefox (that you can add your favourite dev extensions like Web Developer and Firebug ). There are also tips on portableapps.com on how to speed up Firefox portable (that also work on regular FFox). Definitely worth a few hours of time play with. Worth having an old drive in your glove box for that visit to the random relative or friend that "needs your help with something"

Also if you haven't checked out Web Developer and Firebug for firefox, you owe it to yourself as a developer!

PS Don't forget to encrypt that drive with TrueCrypt if you are running around with sensitive customer data!!!!

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Portable Apps and You