Portable Apps allow a whole suite of applications to be run from a memory device. The benefit is that the programs do not have to be loaded on to the host computer, which means that I can use any computer to run a whole number of applications including email clients, web browsers, office and image processing software. I can then take a memory stick on holiday instead of a PC and still have access to all my data and applications on any convenient computer.
The relevance to this website is two fold – first the web pages themselves have been designed, edited and uploaded using Portable Apps and second I can run Stellarium which is a widely used open source planetarium application.
Its very easy to load Portable Apps onto any memory stick but I would recommend using a device with more than 500Mbytes of memory to run the full suite.
First download the set up program for the Portable Apps suite and platform from http://portableapps.com/
At this point you can choose a number of download options that determine how much of the office software you want to load on your memory stick.
Run the set up application which will reformat your memory stick so be careful to back up any data on the stick somewhere else beforehand.
Now when you plug the memory stick into any Windows PC it will ask what action do you want to take inclusing “run portable apps.” It then puts an icon in the system tray (bottom right next to the clock etc.). Click on the icon and a mini desktop pops up and allows you to run applications, back up your data and manage the applications.
Once configured you can add download more software which is relevant to Astronomy including Stellarium portable , Celestia Portable and the GIMP for image processing. Adding applications is just a matter of downloading the program and extracting the program to the portable apps directory. To remove applications you just have delete the program directory from the portable apps directory under the root directory of the memory stick.
The documentation and support on the Portable Apps website is pretty good and there are a wide number of programs available. I have had no problems with data retention or applications crashing but always back up important data, I do not offer any warranty or guarantees!