The Lair

Oh hear ye, hear ye for I have seen the future. Its name? Portable Apps. On the face of it, a simple enough concept. No installation or fancy setup programs required, no uninstallation. Just unzip the application onto your hard disk and it … just works. Some other OS, most notably Mac OSX, have had it for a while now but this new revolution in portable applications is merely a harkening to the heyday of Windows apps; where applications were lean and writing registry keys and registering components were a rarity instead of the norm.

I’ve already tried Portable Gaim 2.0, Portable Firefox 2.0 beta and Nvu Portable. The only criticism I have of this completely wonderful site is that updates seem to take a while to filter through… For example, Gaim is now on beta 3, but PortableApps still offers what seems like beta 1. Still, a minor detail. All of this focus on portable apps started after advent of U3, a proprietary standard for USB thumb drives. It’s a wonderful idea. Just unzip and start using the application. Don’t like it? Just delete the directory and you’re done. No uninstall required.

And in other news, I notice a new version of Google Talk. Some of the features look so cute that I feel compelled to ditch my Jabber client and install the real thing; but I’m valiantly resisting the temptation. The file transfer stuff, well, I’ve heard it promised before but it doesn’t seem to really work all that well. Maybe GTalk will get it right.

And in that promised rant, I want to vent my spleen (not for the first time, and probably not the last) on blinkered OS zealotry. It’s all very well, sez I, to profess love and undying devotion for a particular operating system, piece of software or anything else. But if you’re using it as a tool, then to remain ignorant of other choices is nothing short of criminally stupid. Consider a web designer who says “I love me Firefox. Thus, I don’t care about what happens to IE or Opera or any other browser”. Or consider a budding young sysadmin who says “I love me Linux. So what if I have Windows machines on the network? I don’t like Windows, so I don’t care”. Umm. Yeah. Chances still are if someone offers our young zealot the use of a browser (or OS), it will more likely be IE (and/or Windows) than it will be Firefox (and/or Linux). Figure them both out and then decide which to use. Don’t make the choice based on ideology and then go “la la la la, I hear of no alternatives, I see no alternatives, thus the alternatives do not exist”.

Umm.. [rant mode = off]