tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20873433.post-11574670789756961632008-05-04T09:15:00.000Z2008-05-04T09:16:13.357ZUSB memory sticks (flash drives) are becoming a very common corporate give away. Perhaps you have a spare one tucked away in a drawer. If you have, get it out now.<br /><br />They have come on leaps and bounds over the past year or two and are now available in larger sizes, including 1 and 2 Gb capacity. This makes them far more useful than the older, smaller 128Mb sticks.<br /><br />But have you ever wished you could do something useful with them? Now you can. It is possible to run portable applications straight off the stick instead of installing them on a PC.<br /><br />A portable application is a computer program that you can carry around with you. When your USB flash drive or other portable device is plugged in you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind. And if you haven’t got a memory stick how about using your iPod instead?<br /><br />For example, if you visit a client’s office you can carry your own word processing software with you. Out and about? Find an internet café and use your memory stick to call up your own web browser or bookmarks. Need to edit some photographs while on holiday? No problem, just use your own image editing program. This makes memory sticks a very useful emergency back-up.<br /><br />If you are a PC user hop over to <a href="http://www.portableapps.com/">www.portableapps.com</a> and download a full (free) suite.<br /><br />To give you a flavour of what you can run off a memory stick how about:<br /><br /><strong>AbiWord Portable</strong><br />This program will create, open, edit or save documents in Microsoft Word format. It will also handle Word Perfect, Open Document, RTF, HTML, Palm and other formats. AbiWord includes both grammar and spelling checkers as well as an array of other handy features.<br /><br /><strong>OpenOffice Portable<br /></strong>OpenOffice.org Portable is a full-featured office suite that's compatible with Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, Lotus and other office applications. So now you can handle Excel files while on the move too.<br /><br /><strong>GimpPortable</strong><br />The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program as well as an image format converter.<br /><br /><strong>Nvu Portable or KompoZer<br /></strong>These are both HTML editing programs in case you need to edit any web pages while off site.<br /><br />If you are a Mac user I wouldn’t want you to feel left out. If you go to <a href="http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/">http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/</a> you’ll find a similar list of downloadable portable applications written for OSX.<br /><br />Many of these, including OpenOffice and AbiWord are copies of the PC versions and are very usable. <br /><br />You can also download web browsers and e-mail programs like FireFox, Safari, Thunderbird and Mail for both Mac and PC.<br /><br />So how far can you push a memory stick? As an exercise I installed a full Apache web server on one, along with a Mambo content management system (CMS).<br /><br />With this running it was possible to add content to a “web site” in real time and develop the CMS and site design even though the computer wasn’t connected to the net.<br /><br />Memory sticks have a lot of potential. For the sake of a few minutes work a memory stick with some portable apps could be a Godsend.Steve Nicholshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03564402221894277279noreply@blogger.com