I’ve written before about having a small notebook with me at all times to capture my thoughts. That works great for brief flashes of insight, but sometimes I’m away from home and feel like getting some serious work done.
Rather than lugging around a heavy laptop, I try to keep things light by working from a flash drive. Not only can I load my works in progress onto the drive and go, but I’ve also installed programs called portable apps that have been modified to run entirely off a flash drive.
The benefits are many. I can carry a version of Firefox with all my usual addons installed and my bookmarks synchronized with Foxmarks. It’s amazing how much more productive I am when I have my browser and other programs set up the same wherever I work. It lets me dive right in to the work itself rather than fiddle with settings.
Portable Apps allow me to set up office wherever I have access to a computer. I can work at my parents’ house, at school, at the library, or at work on my lunch break, with all my settings and documents right in front of me.
The best place to get portable apps for Windows is PortableApps.com. You can also get a pop-up menu to access your information more easily. Some of the programs available are:
- Firefox
- 7-Zip, for unzipping files
- AbiWord for word processing, or the entire Open Office suite, for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations
- Sumatra PDF reader
- VLC, a media player for listening to music while you work
- KompoZer, for a little webdesign on the fly
- and Notepad++, for quick, simple text editing
A little Googling will find other portable apps to download. One of these is JDarkRoom, a full-screen simple text editor, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. JDarkRoom isn’t fully portable, but only requires that the host computer have Java installed (which it probably does).
Mac users can get portable apps at FreeSMUG. It’s possible to have a folder for Windows apps and one for Mac apps and just use the ones you need for the computer you’re on.
One warning: before buying a new flash drive for portable apps, search the PortableApps.com forums to see if the flash drive you have your eye on will work well. The first flash drive I bought, a 2 GB Kingston, didn’t work with portable apps. I’m much happier with my second choice, a 2 GB Sandisk Titanium Cruzer. If you already have a flash drive, of course, just try it out. The software is easy to install with the excellent instructions provided by PortableApps.com.
Carrying your office in your pocket means you have more opportunities to tackle those works in progress.
