If you're familiar with Portable Apps, and if you listen to our podcast I’m sure you are, since we talk about them all of the time, you can feel free to skip this post. Otherwise…

I'm sure that at one time or the other you've been at a friends house, or tried to show a co-worker something, and they don't have the application that you need. Or maybe you want to show them how much better your favorite application is at doing something, but of course, they don't have it installed.

Portable Apps is a suite of applications that can be installed on removable media, such as a flash drive or removable hard drive, and then can be run from the same removable media, but on many machines. All of the program's settings, files, data and executables are all stored on that drive. Also works great with Live Mesh.

One example that comes to mind is this: At work, your company uses SharePoint team services, Microsoft's free Portal application. Since some of SharePoint's features are not supported by FireFox, the IT department has forced Internet Explorer as the default browser. Being a little bit of a rebel, you prefer to surf the net in FireFox.

With portable apps, you can just install FireFox Portable on your flash drive, and then anytime you want to surf the web with it, you can just pop in the flash drive, and run FireFox.

As an added bonus, your cookies, favorites, etc are all right there. Bring the same flash drive home and you guessed it, all those settings are still there.

You can download the Portable Apps Suite, or just download and install individual applications. Uninstalling individual applications is as easy as deleting the folder that they are installed in, so I would suggest downloading the suite, and then customizing what you have installed.

I have to thank Art for pointing Portable Apps out to me in the first place. It was a long time ago, but I’m still addicted.