End of U3?

[Andre Garzia]

>

portableapps.com always felt like a hack for me. It uses NDIS (or  
some other acronym) wrapper to hack around the folders tricking the  
enclosed executable to think it is writting to one place when it is  
actually writting to someplace else like the removable media folder.  
This solves some issues but it brings other problems.

Let us go to the important problems (IMHO):
* Removable media is slow. If your app does a lot of file juggling or  
is very disk based, you'll see performance penalty, specially if  
you're using cheap no brand pendrives.
* Limited writting life of flash drives. You can't write on them  
forever, they have a limit and they will fail. I don't think a  
pendrive can stand like a year of heavy use but some application that  
access the disk too much. I can't quote on the limits but they exist.

Good portable apps are designed to be portable from the start, not  
hacked afterward with some tricky folder-phantomizing-tool. Portable  
apps should load all data they need and run from RAM without touching  
the disk, or only touching the disk when it needs to save permanent  
data. This will not only save your precious pendrive but also run way  
faster than some disk happy tool.

And if you're designing your app to be portable from the start, you  
don't need U3. You can build your own launcher. You can join the U4  
yahoo group and help the efforts. U3 good side is not the technology  
but the marketing, it gave apps exposure and a portal that the user  
could navigate and find stuff. I don't like portableapps.com but it  
gives you exposure and lots of users, from a marketing standpoint it  
is cool, from a tech standpoint it feels like a hack to me.

also, their portableapps menu never worked on win98 or win2000 for me.

andre

> That's a good question. I would imagine RunRev has a U3 version,  
> and if they've done that much work it's far easier to make one  
> that'll run on any flash drive.  I couldn't find either on the  
> Download page, though -- anyone know if that's in the works?
>
> For apps that are known to be portable, the directory at  
> PortableApps.com is a good starting point:
>
> <http://portableapps.com/apps>
>
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Managing Editor, revJournal
>  _______________________________________________________
>  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your  
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution