Status of this blog

As you can probably tell since the last post, this blog has been on hiatus.  While I'm still active on portablefreeware, github, and portableapps, I've been having a number of problems with my Google account over the past few years and not keen to keep using their service.

I may continue where I left off, it's just something I'm evaluating.

Backpacking with a USB

A discussion of the value of USB drives for travelers, this one highlighting my own preference for 7zip as a compression and encryption program.

Journalism and PFW

The format I borrow from most closely when writing on PFW is journalism, specifically technical journalism.  That field isn't doing particularly well at the moment, but the lessons of journalists are still as useful as ever, helping draw attention to important projects by focusing on the audience.

How to Write a News Story

Portable and ... "quiet"?

So a post on the site actually has me re-thinking some of our terminology -- specifically around the term "stealth".  It's interesting simply because the term has been in use for so many years and now I wonder if it was the wrong one.  The idea pre-dates my work on the site, but it's something I'll consider.

Anyway here's the full post in case the site goes offline or the comment gets dumped ...

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Ultimately portable software is more broadly a response to behavior by good software on many platforms throwing information, settings and other garbage all over the computer.   (Android is maybe the worst at this but Windows is guilty too.)  Over time that wastes space, slows down the computer, and is a privacy concern because you're not in control of your own data.  That means unless you encrypt the *entire* hard drive, you can't be sure what someone who finds the drive will know about you.

By this reasoning, to call something "stealth" isn't about subterfuge — it's about not throwing junk all over the drive.  I'm actually wondering if we picked the wrong word; I thought about calling it "registry green" for a long time now, but I got stuck on the fact that it's about more than just the registry.

Generally speaking, being self-contained and keeping most changes to the local machine restricted to the local folder means *better* portability, which is why "stealth" or "registry green" status is ideal.  Programs are *less* portable when they write to the registry, AppData, ProgramData, C:\WINDOWS etc.

(Source)

Zap Kindle DRM

I don't necessarily want to add this program to the database, I just want to point out that it exists both to point out the futility of DRM and to encourage people to zap any "rights management" nonsense on their existing books.

ePUBee Kindle DRM Removal

While it's ideal that you just stop buying books from Amazon, this may be a potential alternative.

Website analysis tools

So let's say you work on a website for a decade and then type in that website plus "tags" into a search engine.

Well at least for us, a lot of site analysis tools come up.  There's a lot of data here that I wish I had insight on but maybe someone can find something useful in this mess:

• Webdeveloper resources I frankly don't understand cuz I"m not a webdeveloper anymore and I don't really keep up with this stuff.
• Norton says we're safe
• Lots of neat graphs that I'm not sure say anything.
• Sort of a copy of some of the others I've seen, evidently just grabbing various public data sources.

Micro-transaction ratings

I like this idea for how to accurately describe game revenue models.  I'd like to see something like this generated for freeware, though there's so many slightly different variants (if it only nags you once a month, is that really nagware?), I'm not sure if it would work.

Summaries of Portablefreeware.com

I spend so much time trying to write clear, short summaries of other people's work, I was sort of startled to see a pretty good one about our work:

Huge, regularly updated collection of portable freeware or open source applications of all kinds. No specific launcher is distributed by this site, just the applications. (source)

Not bad.

MakeUseOf adds a bit with:

TPFC is the place to go if you're looking for the largest source of portable applications.

Another review from back in 2008 criticized our entries as out of date, but I think Checker and billon have largely resolved this as I frequently have seen them beat other sites to updates.

Only downside is considerable update lag – it often takes up to week for information on new versions to appear there. (source)

Answering freeware critics

Some time back, a user posted something on the site about being angry about how a given freeware program wasn't doing what he wanted.  This having been a trend over time, what follows is my response that I elected not to post.

Certainly there's real concerns about a program that doesn't work, doesn't work properly, or is just a demo.  That's a topic for another time.  Here we're talking about what are to my mind perfectly good programs that mysteriously get crapped on.

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So I'm getting really frustrated with this whole "looking a gift horse in the mouth" attitude.

First, for whatever reasons, there's a long tradition in freeware of people looking at programs and only finding fault.  They don't like the free thing (often something that came with the source code) because the developer did or didn't include something that a minority of his or her users care about.

Second, I often see freeware get compared unfavorably to software that has adware or bundleware competitions.  Programs that -- by virtue of these additional elements -- have an ongoing revenue flow to help pay for their development, improvement, and support.

Third, very few projects see any donations and many tools highlighted on the site are non-simple to create and maintain.  Even those programs with 100,000+ downloads.  I've been struggling to find ways to support developers effectively, whether feature bounties, Amazon Wishlists, or other methods.

I would definitely understand this response if 1. you had seen a roadmap for this program 2. based on this roadmap (including a specific change) you decided to fund the project 3. the developer reneged on this agreement and 4. you stopped funding the project.  If you paid for something and didn't get what you paid for, that would be a very legit response.   Otherwise I really don't understand this response or it's frequency.

Someone once said you get what you pay for and therefore freeware must be junk, but there is such a thing as charity and giving something away because you want to.

The ugly code problem

More than once I've spoken to a developer who's worked on a project for some time and decided to set it aside.  When I ask them to open the code so that it might be utilized by others, a frequent reason they refuse is because "it's ugly".

Well here's one possible reply: post it anyway and present it as what not to do.

Ongoing drama with free software / open source

I'm extremely frustrated by this situation that seems to come up over and over again: a really amazing open source project starts to take off and then the developer gets frustrated/annoyed with someone forking their project and claiming some level of ownership.  This one in particular was just about editing bad words.

I could really spend ALL my time on this topic.

What not to add

So our site allows folks to add a new entry.  It still has to get voted on to go live on the main site, but this helps move things along.  The problem is we rarely see developers or newcommers follow the existing format.

One submission in particular basically showed what not to do when creating an entry.  This was cleaned up shortly after adding, but this conveniently made a list:



Some of the highlights:

• Over-emphasizing with words (unique, special, superfast) and via bold and capitalized text
• Tons and tons of categories
• Duplicating details about the program in the entry already covered by the entry itself (such as file size and the developer website)
• Frequent repetition of text (unique, easy, fast, etc.)
• Lots of linking inside the entry

In fairness, the last 6 lines were spot on.

Related: How to write/edit an entry

Open source survey

A fascinating look at what's happening in open source development that might give some indications on what's to come:

http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/

Cost of free

An article goes into all the problems with free and open software.  I drafted a response:

Definitely don't use a free browser or a free operating system (except all the major ones are).  Anything besides Microsoft Office is unacceptable (never mind that their support is notoriously bad).  Linux is open source and that's definitely been hijacked many times and caused all kinds of problems so now of course no one uses it except for most servers and most cell phones.

I didn't post it as the article is obviously clickbait nonsense, intentionally written to incite.  While it's wrong on so many levels and shouldn't be worth highlighting, sometimes you have to define your opposite.

File sharing banhammer

The existence of this program and frequent interaction with peer-to-peer bandwidth hogs really made me want to give instructions on our BitTorrent entries about how to cap your connection.  I've been on the fence about this for some time so feedback welcome.

Best of portable

It's not a recent list but still this MakeUseOf article has a lot of real gems that are also on PortableFreeware.

Some developer resources

• Get feedback on your software.  The guy behind 7+ Taskbar Tweaker uses it.
• Documentation isn't fun but here are some good reasons why you should give it your time and energy.
• Especially for developers with big monitors, WinSize2 can help with user interface testing to see how how different window sizes look
  

Another look at filesystems

This time those available primarily on Windows.  Goes into some background, but you can get a good summary towards the end.

The story of Kitchen Sink project (Part 1)

This is part 1 of what might become a series on a project I worked on almost 10 years ago and racked up 16,000+ downloads on torrent networks: the Kitchen Sink.

Origin

Back in 2007, I started having problems with an IBM ThinkPad.  After two system reloads and tech support telling me I had to spend a bunch of money to get a RestoreCD, I decided that it was important to make my laptop easy to break down and bring back.  So I started looking into software that didn't require an install, and mostly left the computer alone. 

At the same time, I was doing tech support on the side and started coming across more and more tools that would help me.  The great data recovery tools to get back files that were deleted or corrupted were a huge hit both just because I could occasionally fix things considered unfixable or undo my own mistakes.

I also liked being able to take my computer with me, whether on CD, DVD, or flash drive.

Launcher

The whole thing really began with an excellent launcher program.  Most importantly, the menu system for all of this software was critical.  You can't just create shortcuts in Windows because those change depending on what drive letter the program is assigned to.  It needs to behave the same whether it's in your CD drive (usually D) or on your flash drive (usually E or F).

Although there were a variety of programs available to do this, the best one I found (and still use) is something called PStart.

Recent finds in the PDF world

• The more time passes the more I like SumatraPDF.  Undoubtedly Adobe Acrobat keeps getting bigger and more bulky but even the alternatives out there focus on features over speed.  Meanwhile Sumatra has near-instant startup and is actually packaged into the next item ...
  
• I still find FileVoyager a little cumbersome to use as compared to other file management tools but it's ability to preview files (primarily PDFs) from a list view is irreplaceable.  OS X is very good about this but FV is even better.
• Firefox's plugin "Print Edit" solves the problem of limited PDF editors out there by cutting out crap you don't need before you initially convert it.  Also, this program has a TON of features under the hood.
• PDF SAM only comes up once in a while but I'm so glad to have it.