PortableApps Delivers Enhanced Beta of its Open Source App Suite

July 24, 2009

From OStatic blogs

PortableApps has issued a new beta version of its Platform 2.0 release, downloadable here. If you’re unfamiliar with PortableApps, I covered it previously here. It’s a suite of truly excellent, pre-selected, open source applications that you can stick on a USB flash drive. That enables you to have your applications–with your pre-set preferences–available to run on any computer, anytime. It’s especially popular as a way to store many useful applications on a pocketable drive, but many netbook owners who don’t want to run bloated applications use the small-footprint apps in the PortableApps suite. The open source applications that you get with PortableApps are top-notch, and the new upgrade to the suite includes many meaningful enhancements.

Among the many open source applications that come in portable versions in the PortableApps suite (you can see more of them in the screenshot below), you get:

ClamWin Portable (antivirus)
Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition (web browser)
Gaim Portable (instant messaging)
OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite)
Sudoku Portable (puzzle game)
Mozilla Sunbird – Portable Edition (calendar/task manager)
Mozilla Thunderbird – Portable Edition (email client)
GIMP - Portable Edition (graphics)

You can read up on the enhancements to the new version of the PortableApps suite here. In addition to being able to autorun applications, and run them as an adminstrator, enhancements include:

Theme Switching - Seven colors (Red, Bronze, Green, Blue, Violet, Black and Silver) are included with the PortableApps.com Platform along with the ability to load other themes in PATheme format (an example is included below).
120dpi Support / Missing Icons Fixed - The whole menu now properly supports 120dpi in Vista and Windows 7. There will be some visual artifacting (as with nearly all apps at 120dpi) but otherwise it all works as expected.
Transparency - You can now set the transparency of the whole menu from 0% to 90% directly from the Options menu.
Favorites - You can now move your most-used apps to the top of the menu (similar to Pin to Start Menu in Windows). You’ll wind up scrolling a lot less.
Better App Hiding - App hiding is now accomplished by right-clicking and then selecting Hide. The app is hidden instantly without the app list being reloaded as it is in 1.5.
App Unhiding - You can unhide apps within the menu by right-clicking and selecting to Show Hidden
Icons. Icons that are hidden are then show with a line through them. You can hide and unhide icons as you wish and then hide them again.

As I noted on WebWorkerDaily, the beta version of PortableApps is for testing purposes, but it’s very stable, and if you depend on this suite of open source applications, the new beta is strong enough to use. If you happen to use a Mac, there is an equivalent offering to PortableApps called MacLibre, which we wrote about here.