Last night I installed portable applications on my 8gig stick. I had been told that the use of portable applications was allowed for the 23things program by another staff member.. It is a very cool tool that is handy in oh so many ways emulating the software on a U3 enabled stick but with many more toys avaliable. Firstly it has it's own firefox - which means you can bookmark all your sign-in pages etc. and pretty much anything else you like and move from computer to computer knowing you have access to your bookmarks. I guess this kind of negates the use of del.icio.us to some extent - but I have had afew people tell me that there are plenty of things they access that they dont want the world to know about. The use of a portable browser also allows you to have your automatic sign-in's and remember me's set up - something that can't really be done on a shared access browser. I also like that it has it's own version of thunderbird, as I prefer what I would refer to as an offline mail access client to the online versions, and these can be used to access G-Mail without having to access the site. It has various other things like a full version of open office and sunbird, which is mozila's answer to the calender of the microsoft suite. I had a play with it this morning before I came to work and I can see the perks of having a movable accessable electronic calender that can be updated and viewed without the need for online access..

All in all I like portable applications and will be using it - although maybe not at work till I get the green light from the powers that be...

Portable apps can be found here