Wouldn't it be nice to have access to some of your favourite software applications from any computer (running on the same Operating System (OS) as yours)? Chances are that when you are using another computer those favourite apps are not available, or they could be a different version. There are two distinct ways that you could go about using the same tools regardless of the computer you use.
- Collaborative on-line tools
- Portable Applications on your USB flash drives (requires that you run the same OS)
Now with the advent of larger capacity USB flash drives you can now travel with your favourite tools. According to Wikipedia : "A portable application, or portable app for short, is a software program that does not require any kind of formal installation onto a computer's permanent storage device to be executed, and can be stored on a removable storage device". A quick search on the Web will reveal a wealth of free portable applications.
Here is a list of my favourite applications that I regularly use.
Suggested list of Portable Applications
- Audacity Portable (A simple audio editor and recorder)
- FastStone Capture 5.3 or (Site 2) (A powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen ) (N.B. the latest version of Capture v6 is Shareware)
- FastStone Image Viewer 3.5 (An image browser, converter and editor)
- FastStone Photo Resizer 2.5 (Convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermark to images in a quick and easy BATCH mode.)
- Flv-Player S A powerful version of Flv-Player)
- OpenOffice.org Portable (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility)
- VLC Media Player Portable (An easy to use media player that plays most audio and video formats)
- 7-Zip Portable (File archiver and compressor)
