Portable apps

While the number of people in Mozambique who own a computer is very small there are huge numbers of people with their own Flash drive. Also called “USB drives” or “Memory sticks” these are an incredibly handy way for people with limited resources to get their toe in the door of the technological world. Increasingly I see Mozambicans trading data via Flash drives. The downside is that they tend to be full of viruses. I seldom allow anyone to stick their Flash drive in my computer but if I do my virus software’s alarms starting sounding.

What I have found exciting is the possibility of a person with a Flash drive being able to keep all his or her data in one place. Not only that, there are some exciting ways for a person to have all the applications they need including web browser, email program and word processor resident on their Flash drive.

I’ve been playing around a lot with TiddlyWiki (start at http://tiddlyspot.com/ to check it out) as a way of facilitating content creation while offline. It’s developed especially to run inside a web browser (FireFox or Chrome work fine, Internet Explorer is iffy). I’ll talk about TiddlyWiki more in the future but right now I want to mention http://portableapps.com/ This is an entire operating system essentially that runs on your Flash drive with a bundle of applications. The potential for this is huge since it makes it easy for someone with only a Flash drive to have all their apps and associated files together in one place. So, if you go into the Internet cafe, you can just plug in your Flash drive, launch Thunderbird and send and receive all your email at once rather than signing on to Yahoo! or Gmail and then losing access to your messages when you sign off.

Now if only I had a fast enough connection to download this and try it out. I’ll have to wait for someone to hand carry me a copy on a Flash drive when they visit in a couple of weeks.

If you try out portableapps let me know what you think of it.