How To Create Your Own Portable App For A Flash Drive

[A Guy]

Over the past few years, USB thumb drives have become very popular. They transfer files relatively fast (compared to CD’s), happen to be extremely small and unobtrusive, and plug into almost any computer with a USB port.

Personally, I have two flash drives on my keychain right now, and I can’t imagine how I ever got by without them. Thanks to the convenience of the modern thumb drive, I can copy documents or other important files onto a small drive that fits in a change pocket, and transfer them to another computer. This is in fact, what most people do with thumb drives–nothing special so far.

Using your flash drive as a backup and transfer device is great–but you haven’t really unlocked the potential of the USB until you’ve installed some programs on it.


Sites like PortableApps actually have pre-packaged applications that you can install directly to your USB drive. These apps, games, and utilities will run from your USB stick when you plug it into a computer(provided that they’re on the operating system the programs run on). Aibek compiled an excellent list of 100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick that I would recommend checking out if you’re looking for pre-packaged programs to put on your thumb drive.

So, you found a really cool application and there was no pre-packaged version of it anywhere on the internet that would install it to your USB drive. Looks like it’s time to learn how to create a portable app for flash drive. Please note: I’m not referring to U3 flash drives; that’s a different ballgame in several ways (even though they can be used much the same way).


http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-portable-app-flash-drive/

A Guy

[safeguy]

Knew of that a year back....it does work with some apps, not all and it isn't truly portable if you ask the purists (they will insist on saying that it will write stuffs to registry, etc, bla bla bla)

However, if you're using this to run apps from a flash drive for 'normal' purposes (don't mind registry being 'touched upon), then it isn't a bad tutorial

[noaccount]

no not bad i havent used sfx before - nice!

[Alboguy]

I can't waste my time building portable apps. If I want some portable apps on my flash drive I would purchase an U3. Anyways nice tut A Guy