003Life on the Go

posted by admin on December 25th, 2007

I remember the days of floppy disks, when I’d exclaim “I’ll never use all of these 1.44 megabytes!”. And then I never did, for I moved up to the realm of CDs and most lately, massive external harddisks.

Yet the newest “productivity hack” is portable applications, run off those ubiquitous flash drives. Now our digital lifestyle is truly flexible; all favorite computer programs with bookmarks and settings are convenient to use, able to be run without a trace on the host computer.

Many excellent guides exist to this new class of lightweight, portable programs. PortableApps promises a “truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). It’s open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.” Their suites are particularly marvelous, packing Firefox, OpenOffice, Media Players, and PDF readers. Also, the program launcher provides one-click access to all critical files and applications.

Lifehacker offers several tricks, such as “quicklaunch workspaces”, which take advantage of AutoPlay. Or to receive some inspiration from what others have done, check out Lifehacker’s Top 10 Uses.

The Portable Freeware collection also offers a repository of guides that show how to make programs portable. Gems on this website include FastStone Capture and Notepad+++.

Or if you really want to get down to the basics, Floppy Office is a collection of lightweight, yet powerful and intuitive programs, coming in at one megabyte.