Keep portable apps up-to-date

Portable apps are an easy way to try out (ok! play with) newer versions of applications  without needing to install them. However, it’s a pain keeping them all updated.

Of course, You can have applications check for newer versions of themselves, most usually by clicking a relevant-sounding menu under Help (E.g. For Firefox, it is Help >> Check for Updates) or change a setting within the application to perform regular checks on it’s own.

Then there are also utilities that will quickly scan through your computer searching for installed programs and then show you a list of available updates. An example is Update Notifier, Filehippo Update Checker, etc. Below is a screenshot of Filehippo’s Update Checker showing me such  list

After trying quite a few of these “update tools”, I settled down on Filehippo (see previous post: “Stay up-to-date with Filehippo”). I prefer using the portable version instead of the one needing an install. You can find a link to download the portable version on the filehippo download page (Screenshot below)

I recently discovered  you can get it to also scan through your portable applications. Open Settings dialogue, under “Custom Location”, click Add and point it to the folder containing your portable application.

In my case, I keep all my portable stuff under individual folders in  d:\utils (screenshot below)

The key part is to choose the right scanning option after you’ve shown it the folder you keep your application in. If like me, you have chosen to show it the parent folder, go for “All Sub-Folders”. If you are pointing it to individual folders, choose “Folder Only”

Click Ok to Finish the process and run the software again. Here are the scan results after making the above changes to the settings (the green arrows point to newly added items showing updates available for my portable apps. The red ones show updates available for my regular installed apps)

Click the Green Download arrow and install away!

Suggestions? Comments? Corrections? Post a comment below or twitter them across to me.

See Also

• FAQ: Portable Applications
• Stay up-to-date with Filehippo

An easy way to disable the Google talk plugin in Firefox

I love the Google Talk app. But i simply hate Google’s voice and video chat plugin for Firefox.  This is mainly because

1. It’s a memory hog (ok, Firefox is the real memory hog here, but this plugin makes its memory consumption peak even higher)
2. It’s prone to being damaged if Firefox crashes for any reasons. There was an occasion when my browser used to crash every time I logged into Google mail and then switched tabs. It turned out the culprit was this plugin and it needed to be re-installed (see this and this).
3. No matter how many times you remove it, it gets re-installed automatically. I hate applications who install themselves on my machine without even prompting me first. Apparently this is a part of the Google’s Update process. This to me looks more like a page taken from Microsoft’s old Windows Update manual. But I must hasten to add that since then M$ has seriously refined its updates. I have no cribs again them on this topic. Here’s you can disable or even completely uninstall this updater.

It is point #3 from above that has me writing this post. In my experience, disabling video/voice chat when using Gmail in Firefox is a sure-fire way of reducing memory usage. I simply download and use the Google Talk software (shown below)!

Start by turning off the little chat box in your Gmail window by clicking the little “turn off chat” link at the bottom of your Gmail screen (screenshot below)

Next comes removing the voice/video plugin (this is the main culprit in my observation).  This is a file named “npgoogletalk.dll”. Close Firefox, find it using Windows or any file search tool you like and delete it. Restart Firefox and you are set.
The only problem is every time I removed the Google video/voice chat plugin, it would come back again within hours. I suspect that’s the Google upgrade process reinstalling it. If you too have noticed the same thing then the only way I can see to work around this problem is to keep the plugin there but simply disable it.
Fortunately, Firefox offers a very simply way to do this within it’s Addons Window (Tools >> Addons). Look under the “Plugins” tab and scroll down until you find entries named “Google Talk Plugin” and “Google Update”

Click on each one and then click on the disable button. That’s it. You don't even need to restart Firefox. It’s as easy as that.
Questions? Corrections? anything else? Post a comment or twitter it across to me.

Correcting Google’s maps

In real life, I am one of the lucky ones to be able to live in a brand new development (new place, new estate and even new roads!). Around where I live, this combo is a rarity to have!  But this real life pleasure has turned into a problem when it comes to using my favourite services on the internet.