Portable Apps Suite
I mentioned Portable Thunderbird in the Email post. The same person who allows us to carry our email around on a USB drive has also developed several other portable versions of applications. You can download them individually or as a whole collection in the Portable Apps Suite (http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_apps_suite/0 ). Imagine carrying around an email program, a web browser, a calendar, an office suite, a chat/IM client, even a web editor and FTP client, all on a USB drive to plug into any Windows computer. That’s all (actually more than) most people use their computers for. And everything is configured just the way you like it, because they are actually your own copies of the software that you don’t share with anyone else who uses that computer.
The programs available in the Suite (or separately) include: Firefox (web browser), Thunderbird (email client), OpenOffice (office suite), AbiWord (word processor), NVU (web editor), Sunbird (calendar & task list), FileZilla (FTP client), and Gaim (instant messenger). The whole Suite will fit on a 256 Mb drive. There is also a version without the OpenOffice (but including the stand alone word processor) that will fit on a 128 mb drive (which can be bought for $20 these days).
All of these programs have desktop (non-USB) versions, so you can work on your files at home, at work, or on the go. (One warning: Sunbird is still in alpha and so may not be the best choice for a desktop calendar program, but Portable Sunbird can import/export to Apple’s iCal or any other calendar program that uses the iCal standard .ics file format. Sunbird does not sync with Palm OS devices. Yet.)
This would be a great system for Mac users who are stuck using Windows computers every so often, too. No worries about whether or not Microsoft Office will read your Mac files, because OpenOffice has a Mac version that reads/writes exactly the same files as the Windows version. OpenOffice will read and save to Microsoft formats, too, and save to PDF and HTML.
