Sun Entrance: 42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac

1. Sun Entrance: 42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac Computer

Mac users no longer need to feel left out of the “portable app” craze. If you have a USB stick and you'd like to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gimp or other apps in portable form, you can.

Sun Entrance: 42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac Computer

Mac users will be happy to know the list also includes some of Apple's stock apps like Safari, Mail, iCal, iChat and Address Book. For those that don't know, portable applications are packaged so you can carry them on a USB thumb drive, iPod, memory card, or any other portable memory storage device.

They're compiled in such a way that your preferences are read and written to the portable drive so you can have your settings and preferences available on any machine. The ubiquitous presence of USB stick drives has seen an growing demand for portable apps. There's several repositories of portable Windows application out there, but this is the first I've seen that is Mac specific. I suppose you could argue that there aren't as many Macs out there to plug your USB stick into which might make these less useful, but I'm sure Mac users will appreciate the possibility. It's a small point, but I'm curious why a group calling itself the Free OpenSource Software Mac User Group lists Safari and other Apple software that isn't open source.