Pstart questions

1.When I start the program, I get a weird error message about Pstart.xml. I think the file is corrupted. What do I do?

Just delete the old Pstart.xml file and rename "Pstart.bak" to "Pstart.xml" and you should be back online. I don't know why this happens but its come up a few times for me over the life of the program.

2. Icons not portable - I'm creating my own Pstart menu for my own collection and trying to use the different icon for each folder idea you use. Unfortunately, its not showing up right on other people's computers. (paraphrasing Russ)

A. If they're using Windows 2000, you'll have some mixed experience with icons. I don't know why.

B. If I were you I would pull up the Pstart menu XML file and look at the code directly.

It should say something like:

<files name="Internet">
<icon>web.ico</icon>

I would keep all the alternative icons in the same directory as Pstart. No reason really, just how I do it and it works for me.

Software list cleanup and additions

Major updates to the software list today. Filled in quite a few more fields and referenced my portable freeware reviews site directly. Slowly the holy trinity of reviews, software, and information is all coming together.

Hopefully a year from now it will be a really stellar project.

Other freeware collections

Some fellow projects I'll be looking at and learning from:

Free:

• WinInzio - (softpedia mirror)
• Lupo-PenSuite (softpedia mirror)

Non-free:

• PC Helper Utilities - (only on softpedia)

FastStone Image Viewer

Increasingly annoyed with XnView on my laptop keyboard so I've switched over to FastStone, also included in the Kitchen Sink. So far a lot happier, although the number of images supported are TINY by comparison (see below). I'm tempted to just deal with XnView so I don't confuse users but usability is far better:

• Prefer its image editing tools to shrink stuff for email as well as other effects.
• Keyboard shortcut settings are far better
• The right-click zoom in is SO convenient

Other config changes to adapt the software to my preferences:

• Was able to turn off the green text description up at the top so I turned that off. "Settings - Viewer - Show filename in Full Screen - Text"
• Setup MS Paint as an editor. This will probably only work for Windows XP and 2000 as the location for that software likely changes on other Windows versions.
  
• Also turned on "Smooth" in the same area to "before shown" just because it looks a lot cleaner.
• Increased default Thumbnail size.
• Here are the CAFE settings to switch over to FSV.

Flight delays due to lack of fuel

Because of troubles over at portablefreeware with Dreamhost in the past few weeks and PortableApps focus on an Installer platform rather than new or updated software, there haven't been a great deal of accepted updates by the community to add to the next Kitchen Sink collection. As a result, I'm going to change the release schedule to every 4 months and hopefully there will be more of a reason to post. Need more time to find a BitTorrent distribution system anyhow.

In the meantime, I'll be focusing on my portablefreewarereviews site, which will hopefully help me find new and better software to throw in.

Update: Of course right after I write this, both sites put out updates. Sigh.

Portable platform is here

Great news: Portableapps Installer just came out, which allows other developers to modify their own applications for PortableApps. This is great because its basically creating a platform for portable software that makes it easy for other developers to get on board and hand their software to users without their users needing to be tech savvy. Hopefully this will pull more developers towards making portable software and this will only increase the size of Kitchen Sink.

Great job, PortableApps.

Software addition: Testdisk

After a number of stellar reviews, I'll be including this in my next release. Probably Photorec too.