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[This project has been discontinued due to license compliance issues. Thanks everyone who assisted with your ideas and feedback.]

About

  • What is this? - this was a project dedicated to building an up-to-date collection of great, free portable software for easy installation and use.
  • What's in it? - list of included freeware
Releases
  • v. 1.3 beta - note that this release is over a year old and contains very out-of-date software. I haven't worked out how to solve licensing issues. Download

NEWS

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Lupo PenSuite vs. Kitchen

I spent some time with a similar portable freeware tool.  Some results...

Bad about Kitchen / good about theirs
  • Software that self-checks for the latest versions
  • Installer that self-checks for problems and is smooth and clean
  • A much more friendly rewrite of CAFE.  Very pretty.
  • "Photos", "documents", and other folders that all the programs automatically default to
  • My menu is increasingly cluttered as I keep adding stuff
  • Not very skinnable - theirs has great skins built right in
  • I need a changelog.txt and license.txt -- maybe all under "readme"
  • Their "starter" software rules -- it has a services pane that's fantastically detailed.  Fortunately I can add this to future editions.
  • ASuite - their version of Pstart -- is GPL'd and makes my menu system look cluttered.
  • Smaller, lighter, leaner, and smoother.
Good about Kitchen / bad about theirs
  • Has FAR fewer programs than Kitchen and much limited functionality
  • My Pstart setup is much cleaner and more responsive than these menus - the fade in look of the menu felt clunky
  • I don't put links in my software to online resources, which are useless if you're stuck without a net connection
  • Their version of CAFE only has 35 file associations
  • Mine has a more consistent look and feel-- the skins probably cause problems in documentation
  • Folder Size is not as good as Folder Sizer (Kitchen Sink's version is WAY better)

2 comments:

Guinness said...

I can't wait till your June release. One thing I noted when I downloaded your March version is that in the PStart.xml it shows how many times the programs have been used and the overall time PStart has been running. I don't know if it would be beneficial to edit these values so the user can have a true representation of how long they have been using Kitchen Sink. Also congrats on the C.A.F.E. ini files, that is truly cool, I will change some of the programs especially Notepad++ (WinPenPack Version - Sorry :-0 ) because I found that if you direct a file via C.A.F.E. it rights the settings to the %APPDATA% folder, even though if you directly access Notepad++ it writes to the Portable Data Folder. I don't know if this happens with PortableApps version?

Folding Home said...

1. Thanks for the anticipation! I hope a lot of people downland and enjoy this.
2. I'll see about cleaning up the Pstart values -- that just seems necessary.
3. I tried screwing with Notepad++ trying to get it to write to appdata but Sandboxie didn't want to help me watch for that. I'm not sure what is causing that and I'm dismayed to be sure. Ugh.