Are your applications portable?

Installing software applications on your computer is one thing. However, what if you want to use them on a different system? Or how about the situation when your OS has to be re-installed? This brings up the question posed in the title of this blog post: Are your applications portable?

One solution is to use “portable” versions instead of “installable” versions – meaning, you’d be able to just extract the application binary to just a directory directly and use it from there on. Having portable versions of the programs is good. Wouldn't it be better to have an entity to manage all such portable applications? This is exactly where the solution offered by this Techbit, PortableApps comes into picture.

PortableApps lets you install various applications and manage them easily. It can be downloaded from http://portableapps.com/. Not all the applications are covered as of now but the positive side is PortableApps is gaining popularity and we should be seeing the application repository of PortableApps ever increasing.

To summarize, following approach is what I would generally suggest in the context of installing software:

• If the software has a portable version compatible with PortableApps, use it.
• If not, check if a portable version of the software exists and use it if so.
• If the software does not offer any portable version, only then install it in the installable mode.