"What is a portable sink?"

The name of my project means quite a bit and the answer explains clearly the idea behind this project:

If you're not American or English isn't your first language, I realize that doesn't really translate. Its short for the euphemism "everything but the kitchen sink," which is to say as much as possible. The idea is that if you take everything with you, you're prepared for anything. This is sort of like the phrase "when pigs fly": an example in Spanish that means basically the same thing would be "cuando la rana crece el pelo" which means "when frogs have hair"; it doesn't make any sense to people not familiar with the saying but is equivalent.

The idea for Kitchen Sink is that I put as much in this archive as possible. Other portable collections only put in open source software (PortableApps.com), only very small tools (Tiny USB Office), or only tools that will tie into their internal system (Lupo). I put in EVERYTHING I can but avoid:

• Duplicate programs
• Anything buggy or overly obscure
• Games

International status

As of this writing, some cool things have happened:

• Over 1,200 people have downloaded the program in the last 8 hours.
• 121 people are "seeding," or helping distribute this software.
  
• Most impressive to me is that people all over the world now are using this software.
  

One piece of bad news: one user on Mininova's forums complained of problems on Vista 64.  I am unable to test this OS but none of my users have had any issues with previous versions and the software hasn't changed enough to create problems.

All told this has been a great weekend for me and portable freeware.  I'm ecstatic.

Where did these icons come from?

Attribution time -- all the icons I use are by some extremely talented people.

• The totally badass "official" icon as well as for "Network" tools
• A few icons also by this guy.
• Most of the Pstart menu is populated by these.
• Icon I use for Firefox - Secure version

List of preferences in software

1. Critical features - grammar checking and dvd burning are still things you can't quite get for free. This is why I have Microsoft Word and Nero on my computer.
   
2. Free (as in no cost) and can share openly
   
3. Portable - runs on flash drive, no installation (this is #3 because if its portable and not free, I don't care)
   
4. Quality - good usability, visually clean, internally organized, low memory footprint
   
5. Amount of features - does a lot of stuff
6. Free (as in freedom) / open source - GPL, LGPL, Creative Commons, etc. Anything in which the owner releases control of the software to the public. No weird, cryptic license agreements.
   
7. Ethical company (# 6 is part of this, but better establishes it)
8. Cross Platform but must run on Windows

I'm extremely available to working with Java programs but the current status of that on PortableFreeware is a no-no. I'm going to trust their judgment and wait.

Genesis of the project

Those curious about the twists and turns this project has taken can see how things came together over time from a series of online posts. The starting ground for this whole thing was on PortableFreeware's forums:

1. Initial estimation of public interest in an online poll
2. Release notice of the "Kitchen Sink"

Its worth noting that I almost gave up on the project until a guy named David e-mailed me about it. So if you like the project, let me know and post a comment.

Why?

A little background for why I work on this project:

1. My own use. I use this archive absolutely every day and love having the functionality of so many programs that gives me enormous flexibility in my job and in my life. Its like having a huge tool belt that fits on a tiny 2 gig SD card.
2. Popularity. Having worked on so many projects over time, its nice to be responsible for one that has hundreds of users.
3. Unique. No one else is doing anything like this that I can find. There are many freeware archives out there but none of them are ocused on doing something of this size and depth.
4. Publicity for small projects. Creators of smaller freeware items might not get a lot of credit but when put into an archive like this, may find new users. Millions of people use Apache everyday but how many people use Color Cop?
5. Virtualization. Its clear to me that Windows is not the future of computing. By getting developers to put their work into portable archives, they are made easier to virtualize (by projects like WINE) and run in environments other than those belonging to Microsoft.