Fellow Downtown Memphis blogger Sig shot me an e-mail this morning to let me know that there’s something even cooler out there than OpenOffice, which I recommended yesterday. It’s called PortableApps, and it’s an entire suite of open-source software that you can carry around with you on any storage device – for example, a USB flash drive
Being able to carry all your software, files, and bookmarks around with you has a number of advantages. I can see this being especially useful if the main computer you use is not a computer you own. For example, if you use the computer lab at school, you can use the word processor running on your flash drive with your customized settings and preferences, rather than the school’s.
It’s also useful because it doesn’t leave a footprint… no evidence is left of what you’ve been doing on the computer you’re using. This could be handy if, for example, you want to use your office computer to edit your resume.
Sig tells me that he has an 8 GB flash drive