Make your own Portable Thunderbird

Wow, Two in one go...I'm a super man!

Here it is, making the Official build of Thunderbird portable. In case you didn't already notice the post about making Firefox portable with the Official build, you may want to take a peek. Not that much of a difference in this post. Same song and dance, different app.

Thunderbird -profile "[Profile path]" -turbo

[Profile path] can be anything, relative, absolute, as long as you don't end it with a trailing back slash.

"E:\Thunderbirddata\Profile" Works
"E:\Thunderbirddata\Profile\" Fails with a program crash.

With this you won't have to invoke -CreateProfile to make a new profile, Thunderbird does that for you in the specified directory, and -turbo makes Thunderbird load faster.

I used the information from my post concerning Firefox, which based of the information supplied here.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

Making your own Portable Firefox

Firefox.exe -profile \profiles\ProfileName

This may upset some people but I wanted to do it for the sake of doing it. What I present for you is a method of running Firefox From your USB drive/device and have the security to know it was the Official Mozilla build that you are using. This can be performed from DOS, a shortcut, a program launcher, etc. And right about now you're waiting for the ultimate weapon so here it is.

Firefox -profile "[Profile path]" -turbo

Now [Profile path] can be anything, relative, absolute, as long as you don't end it with a trailing back slash.

"E:\Firefoxdata\Profile" Works
"E:\Firefoxdata\Profile\" Fails with a program crash.

To make it even better you don't need to invoke -CreateProfile to generate a profile, you just need to provide a specified directory. And Firefox will make one for you. Sweet eh? And yes, I included -turbo not for good measure, but because it makes Firefox load that much faster. Much faster than just UPX'ing it. I'll be making a similar post concerning Thunderbird.

I used the information supplied here to help make this post.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

Portable Prism

Since Mozilla unveiled the "site specific browser" WebRunner, which loads a specific web app/site and only that w/o using much of a UI and relying on the web app to be the only user interface you need. Currently Mozilla has changed the name and has adopted the name Prism. And while I love the idea I can honestly say that I don't find it too practical making it portable. I'll be ready to back down on that should I be wrong, but for right now I find it highly unlikely.

This site here(in Spanish) made it portable but never once goes into the details of what was done.
http://abraham.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/mozilla-prism-portable/


So that means I guess I'll be going to the challenge of outdoing this person and providing details. That is of course if there is any major demand to do so, unless I feel it should be done just to do so.

Meebo makes more updates!

Meebo now has voice and video conferencing, for any network. As well as the ability to develop plugins for their Instant Messaging web-form.

What is this extra crap in Winamp's installer?!

I decided to try Winamp5 today as a request and write up a short review(in much protest) about how it functions and the process of making it portable. It used to be as easy as using Universal Extractor and then renaming some folders and paths. Now on the other hand, you have different fingers. Winamp is easy to use and can have a very simple and minimalistic interface is very customizable. If you try to use Universal Extractor you'll be in for a world of frustration over what goes where and what to change. You'll also find about 5MB or more of useless data should you you feel brave enough to attempt this method of rolling your own portable Winamp. After searching around some forums I found that the easiest method would be to simply get the installer and do a quick install, make a copy, and then uninstall Winamp.

For those who feel brave enough to extract the files manually, you may be interested to peek at some of the useless extra files.