2010 Challenge, Week #30 - Portable Application Suite

The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.

Week: 29

The Challenge/New Experience: Create a portable application suite for USB thumb drive.

Hello again, Dear Reader. You know, one of the things that I strive for with this year-long challenge, tangentially, is not to have too many similar tasks in a row.  I have a lot of “crafty” items on my list, a lot of cooking items, a lot of computer geeky items. I just did a computer geeky one last week, so it wasn’t my intention to do another this week, is my point.

But, I did anyway. I have plans for a pretty cool New Thing coming up in another week or so (something that needs to be done when I have a TON of free time and the right frame of mind), so I’ve been knocking out some smaller “filler” items while I try to arrange scheduling for the bigger one.

Anyway. Let’s talk about Week #30 — portable applications.  A portable application is a smaller, scaled-down version of a software program that you can run directly off a USB drive. Couple of advantages to this:

1. A portable application doesn’t make any changes to your registry or your hard drive, and uses up less of your PC’s resources to run.
2. Helpful if you’re working on a computer where you’re not allowed to install your own software, like a work computer.
3. Really really helpful if you’re troubleshooting problems on a friend or relative’s computer, which is so jacked up it won’t even allow you to download or install antispyware programs.

More about this task after the jump!

I’m extremely fond of thumb drives and portable applications. I don’t know why. Here’s a small assortment of my thumb drives:

I buy thumb drives the way other people buy CD’s or DVD’s. If I see one for under ten bucks, I’ll buy it. I don’t need them, but I can’t resist them. I’m always looking for something new to do with a thumb drive — I store pictures and music on one, light data backup on another, bootable Linux operating system on others, and as you already know from Week #6, I installed Mac OS 7 on one of them.

But I have a particular affinity for portable applications and suites — a suite basically bundles it together so all you do is plug the drive in, and a little menu launches displaying all your applications. There’s a lot of pre-configured suites out there, and I’ve tried several. But with these pre-configured menus and launchers, I’m bound to the applications those developers choose (including a lot of crap I don’t need), and I’m stuck viewing it through their menu. They’re nice menus, but I kept thinking to myself, “I’d rather design my own portable suite, with the applications that I want, and the menu and launchers that I want. Wonder if that’s something I can do?”

Enter Pstart. Pstart installs a tiny little blank menu on your thumb drive, which you can then customize to your liking. So here was the goal:

1. Install PStart on one of my many thumb drives.
2. Set it up so that the menu will auto-launch anytime I plug the drive in.
3. Install applications on the thumb drive and add them to the menu.

Installing Pstart was easy — just download and run.  Voila, a blank menu:

With a couple of additional hints from Lifehacker, I was able to script a little autorun and batch file. It’s just a couple of lines in a text file, but since I’d never written a batch file before, or an autorun file, I still consider this an accomplishment.

Finally, time to install the portable applications themselves, and design the menu. Here’s a view of the menu from the task tray:

And here’s one of the full pop-out menu:

Finally, a quick demo of the menu auto-starting when I insert the USB drive, and then me clicking through the menu a bit, just to show you how it works.

As with many of my nerdier pursuits, it’s not something I expect everyone to run right out and try for themselves, but I have to tell you, I love that I was able to accomplish this week’s task — it’s something I’ve wanted to do for the last couple of years, and now I have!

Coming up next week, another Baking Task!  Tune in!

Related posts:

1. 2010 Challenge, Week 29: VirtualBox
2. 2010 Challenge – Week #6: Mac-on-a-Stick
3. 2010 Challenge, Week #14 – Autohotkey script
4. 2010 Challenge, Week #33 – A Day in Pictures
5. 2010 Challenge, Week #28 – Installing a car stereo