End of U3?

[Judy Perry]

Andre,

Of course, what I'm specifically looking to do (or, rather have my
students do) IS a hack -- of IT's iron-fisted grip on what software that
can be used in the classroom.

I did think about the speed issue... but our network's so crappy that
slow isn't going to strike the students as particularly odd :-/


Judy

On Tue, 15 May 2007, Andre Garzia wrote:

> >
>
> 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
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