What is a portable application?

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a USB flash drive (a "stick") and use on any Windows computer. When your stick is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind on the PC.

In an effort to "eat our own dogfood", we have developed most of the software for App-Stick from a 2GB stick with portable applications (XAMPP, PSPad, FileZilla, Firefox,...). As a result, we can plug that stick into any of our computers and get to work immediately. We love it!

Why are these applications free?

Most of these applications have been developed as Open Source Software, free to use and modify under the GNU license. Most of these projects accept donations to help support the efforts of programmers and overhead of developing and hosting them on the internet.

Can any PC application be used on a stick?

No. Most applications rely on the particular PC on which they are installed. Portable applications are designed to avoid getting threaded into a particular PC. A portable app should write no data to the PC or its registry; all relevant data should be written to the stick on which the application resides.