12 Must have Portable Apps for your USB drive

12 Must have Portable Apps for your USB drive

taken from shankrilla.com

I use my 2GB Kingston U3 enabled USB drive a lot. The reason? The availability of a variety of portable applications and most of them for free. For your reading pleasure, here are a few of my favorites.

Web

• Mozilla Firefox - Very handy to have if you frequent your IE using friends or relatives. (Firefox 3 beta 4 is available as a portable app right now)
• GreatNews - A portable feed reader I am very fond of.
• Trillian - Excellent IM chat application.
• myPodder - Great tool for podcast lovers - needs a podcastready.com account.
• KeePass - Password manager on the go. Uses good encryption.

Office

• OpenOffice - A full fledged alternative to Microsoft Office. AbiWord is an excellent choice if you just looking for a Microsoft Word alternative.
• EditPad Lite - Supercharged Notepad with lot of nice features.
• FoxIt Reader - A simple and fast PDF reader. Download the zip file for a standalone app.
• 7-zip Portable - Excellent archiving tool supporting multiple formats like zip, unzip, tar, etc.

Blogging

• Portable Live Writer - Your Windows Live Writer to go.
• IrfanView - Lghtweight but feature rich image editor. If you like Gimp, there is a portable version for it too. (Free Vectors)
• Filezilla - Small and portable FTP client.

There are many open source portable applications available at PortableApps.com. Or if you are a U3 user, then at U3.com.

If you don’t want to mess with individually downlading each of these, Portable Apps offers a PotableApps Suite in 3 flavors to download a bunch of apps at one shot.

PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition) - 89.5MB

PortableApps Suite (Lite Edition) - 30.4MB

Now, you can put that USB drive you won in a contest or the one they gave away in a conference or the one you bought from a SlickDeal to good use. Never be without your favorite app anymore.

If you have found some cool portable app that is not in the list, I would love to know.