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Portable Apps for the Mac

Will Kelly — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:00:13 +0000

I have a keen interest in portable apps (like those covered by Doriano) from my time spent working on client sites. Having a suite of productivity applications on a USB flash drive has come in handy many times in my consulting career, especially when I’ve needed a graphics application.

The Windows portable apps suites seem to better known, but I came across a slew of free Mac portable apps while researching another topic, so I thought I would share them here, as they should be useful if you ever have to “hot seat” on a customer’s Mac or breathe some life into an older Mac that may not have all the software you require. In each case, the install routine follows Mac standards, which makes installation from a Flash drive simple and quick.

Portable GIMP. The popular open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop is available as a portable application, which can come in handy if you work on projects where graphics applications are in short supply. It requires X11 to run.

Portable Firefox. Mozilla Firefox isn’t always available on our clients’ machines, but Portable Firefox is an easy alternative to pack along for testing or other activities. While this version of Firefox is compatible with extensions, you are best keeping it “lean and mean” if running Firefox from a USB drive. Portable Firefox will let you import your local Firefox preferences if they are available on the machine.

Portable Camino. If Firefox isn’t your browser of choice, you can use Portable Camino to meet your portable browsing needs. The good news is that the portable browser’s features are on a par with the full version.

Portable Adium. This portable version of the popular multiprotocol and open-source Instant Messaging client supports AIM, GTalk, Yahoo and Jabber IM. Portable Adium lets you import your local Adium preferences if they are available.

Portable Nvu. The portable version of Nvu can come in handy if you need a text editor for editing HTML and other files.

Portable AbiWord. Portable AbiWord is a great portable word processor for most general word processing uses.

Portable OpenOffice.org. There is a portable version of the popular open-source office suite available. However, the only stable version is for the PPC platform, with the Intel version still in testing and not ready for use yet.

Remember, if you plan to take a USB flash drive with portable apps to a client site for use of one of their machines, you should always check their IT security policy, because they may have security restrictions in place.

Do you use Mac portable apps? Which ones?

Top-Notch Tutorials for Three Great Software Freebies

Samuel Dean — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:27 +0000

I’m a big fan of open source software as well as freeware, but one of the problems these applications often have is lack of documentation and tutorials. It can be frustrating enough to try to wing it with a new, free software application that many people will just throw their hands in the air and give up. That’s a shame.

In this post, I’ll cover some solid, free tutorials for excellent free software titles. If you quickly download them and walk through these primers, you’ll be good to go.

On the OStatic blog, I just covered Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference, which is a book you can buy at Amazon for just under $10, but it’s also available as a free download here. It’s a really excellent, thorough guide to getting going with one of the most popular and flexible Linux distributions. If you’re curious about Ubuntu or already running it, you’ll find much to like in the book, which is written by serial Linux author Keir Thomas. Many web workers can greatly expand the arsenal of good applications available to them by delving into Linux, and this is a good, free way to get started.

In this post, you’ll find a number of good tutorial resources for GIMP, which is the widely used open source graphics program that originated at UC Berkeley. Also from the Free Books Department, there is a discussion of Grokking the GIMP there. Grokking the GIMP is a free online book, and you can check out how exhaustive the tutorials are here in the Table of Contents. If you work with graphics at all, it will cost you nothing to get up to speed with one of the most widely used open source applications. GIMP is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux.

Finally, I’ve written before about IrfanView, a really great, lightweight Windows graphics program, which I use every day. IrfanView runs deeper than it appears to upon first glance, and it’s light on documentation. For a quick walkthrough of most of the basic features, try Millenium’s IrfanView tutorial. Once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll quickly move on to advanced tasks that IrfanView is good at, such as batch image processing.

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Free Tools for Site Designs, Logos, and Prototypes

Samuel Dean — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:34 +0000

A while back, a friend of mine and I had an idea for a new e-commerce web site we were thinking of launching. We eventually shelved the idea after digging up a couple of sites that were too close in spirit to the same idea, but one of the things I remember we worked hard on was mocking up a good looking design for the site, complete with a slick logo. This can be more dificult than it seems at first, but is an important first step in moving from your vision of a web site to execution.

Here are some free resources that can make the process easier, and provide good prototyping results.

Are you familiar with the free, open source applications Blender and Gimp? The former is one of the most respected 3D animation and graphics programs, and the latter is one of the best loved graphics programs. The web abounds with useful tutorials for creating slick logos in Blender as seen here, and here. You can easily learn to make animated or still logos for a web site with Blender. For Gimp, too, there are many tutorials for making slick logos. Try searching at Gimp-Tutorials.net for examples.

You can also find free logos at LogoInstant. The site shares slick looking logos every day, and they’re free to use as either inspiration for a version that you modify, or you can just use the logos as they stand.

Back in June, Mike covered Open Source Web Designs, which provides over 2,000 free web design templates that you can work with for free. Most of them are XHTML- and CSS-based.

Finally, if you are collaborating with another web worker on a prototype for a site design, one of the best loved, free tools for doing so is JumpChart, which I wrote about here. It lets you build and save versions of your site through several iterations. The free version only gives you 10 pages to work with, but that’s usually enough for a basic prototype that you can build out from.

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6 Free, Open Source Resources for Web Workers

Samuel Dean — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:39 +0000

Over on the OStatic blog we’ve rounded up 25 resources for free, open source applications, tutorials, and more. Some of the citations are previous roundups themselves, so there are quite a lot of free tools to be found there. In these economic times, open source software applications are faring well, and some tools may especially appeal to web workers.

From the collection posted, here are six resources that may appeal to you, and you can find out more on them in the original post.

Video playback and encoding are increasingly being used on cutting-edge sites and blogs, and there are a lot of good open source tools in this area, as discussed here. For Mac users, Simple Theora Encoder is a particularly easy-to-use video encoding tool–a favorite among several of the OStatic writers.

Two of the shortcomings that open source applications often have are minimal documentation and support. Especially when it comes to popular applications, though, the open source community does a good job of posting free tutorials for useful applications. You can find 16 of them here for GIMP (graphics), OpenOffice, virtually every Linux distribution, and more.

For Mac users, Mac Libre remains an unparalleled way to get a bushel of free, open source applications in one download. The download is fast and light enough that you can even store all the applications on a USB thumb drive. Editors choose the applications, which include Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Mozilla Sunbird–Portable Edition (calendars and tasks).

Most web developers are already pretty savvy about the many free tools–many of them open source–that are available to them. There are some lesser-used tools, though. Kompozer is a huge favorite with developers who are into CSS (cascading style sheets). Kompozer’s rendering engine uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Mozilla’s Firefox. It stands out for its very easy-to-use CSS editor, and strong WYSIWYG features.

Mozilla has recently updated its Thunderbird e-mail engine, which is a good adjunct to webmail. One of the strengths of Thunderbird is the galaxy of useful add-ons that are available for it (similar to Firefox extensions). Here you’ll find many top-notch add-on examples.

Are you looking to buy a netbook? These inexpensive, lightweight portable computers aren’t for everybody, but they’re currently outselling the iPhone. Here are some thoughts and a collection of links that you may find useful.

You can find much more of these resources, and lots of free, useful software, in the OStatic roundup.

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