For over a couple of months now I’ve almost exhausted every site offering portable apps and I still don’t think I’ve had enough.

When I bought a 2G USB last semestral break, I didn’t know that it’ll practically become my beloved toy. It all happened when I was browsing through sites about good handling of usb drives (because I remembered my first usb’s shocking death after only a week after its 6-month warranty) but instead landed on the hometown of the so-called portable applications, portableapps.com.

Portable apps are, in brief terms, applications that run directly on your usb flash drive, pendrive, or whatever you call it. These applications are just like any applications, only that you don’t have to install them and they are literally almost reduced to half their sizes bytewise.

I have with me, after a lot of deleting, adding, and resurrecting, 14 portable apps that I now can’t live without. These are, in order of importance:

1. Mozilla Firefox (best browser so far)
2. AM-NOtebook
3. Pidgin (an all-in one messenger)
4. Wordweb (a mini dictionary on the go)
5. MediaPlayer Classic packaged with K-lite codec pack (plays virtually any media file)
6. Foxit Reader (reads pdf with tabbing feature)
7. FSCapture (screen capture with a few tricks)
8. Converber (1000+ conversions)
9. 7-Zip (small but powerful compression tool)
10. Notepad++ (opens text files notepad can’t)
11. Frostwire (alternative for limewire)
12. Flashget (fastest download manager in the world, so they say)
13. Abiword (a more msword-y alternative than open office)
14. Sudoku (addicting game)

For me the best portable app currently available is Mozilla Firefox portable. My own firefox, for instance, has installed plug-ins and extensions in it which I personally chose and are happily working with to my heart’s content. My bookmarks are saved and my page history as well. That doesn’t sound so special, I know, but the juicy part is, I get to load this firefox over any computer and my settings are not lost, my browsing remains private, and best of all, cookies and saved passwords are safe and need not be cleared. That means easy browsing and absolutely no hassle in signing in to different sites.

I used to prefer chrome before firefox but the portable version is slow in downloading and saved passwords are not handled that securely. Firefox has a lot of add-ons to choose from to making this browser highly customizable and personalized.

My other favorite is the AM-notebook. This app works like Microsoft One-note, with less of everything except functionality. This app comes in handy whenever I collate information and pictures on the net and saving them in one file without the hassles of unnecessary formatting. The notes are not saved separately but can only be accessed through the application itself. It works prefectly for what it is made for – a handy-dandy notebook.

If you want to have your own set of portable apps in your usb drive, the first stop for portable apps is at portableapps.com.  But they have a limited collection of portable apps, so you might want to check these other sources: portablefreeware.com, pendriveapps.com, and softpedia.com .

At portableapps, you can get the portableapps menu launcher where you can place all your apps in a way that programs appear in the start menu. This eliminates the need to browse through your usb using windows explorer just to get to your portableapps. The default PAM launcher looks like this:

But it’s quite boring, so I switched to this:

This cool iPOD theme as well as a lot more can be downloaded from ptc.kain-planet.de. They also have a modification of the portableapps launcher which addresses some of the PAM’s limitations.