Avedesk

Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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iMartyr
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2006 8:57 am

Avedesk

#1 Post by iMartyr »

www.avedesk.org has a great application that is an engine for desktop widgets! Pretty sure you can configure it to run portably by changing a line in the file settings_overrides

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Fluffy
Posts: 457
Joined: Sat Apr 15, 2006 6:37 pm

#2 Post by Fluffy »

I modified the ini to make this portable, but got some rather ominous results from a Regshot scan...

Image

Extremely funny, but I'm not sure if this is really a good idea for portability. Added a ton of reg keys and created the Avedesk folder in %appdata% (granted it was empty, but still seems sloppy to me) regardless of the settings in the .ini, so I'm a bit hesitant. Can anyone with multiple computers test this one out? In order to make it function portably, edit the settings_overrides.ini and uncomment the lines NoFileAssociations=true and NoMultipleUserAwareness=true. I'm pretty sure that should do it, I'm looking for your feedback.

As I previously stated, even with these settings registry entries will be created, but I'm more concerned about the actual portability of the application.

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Andrew Lee
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#3 Post by Andrew Lee »

Seems to be portable. I ran it on a Win2K VM, moved it to my main WinXP machine, and it runs without a hitch, retaining all my previous entries.

A couple of observations:

- Requires GDIPLUS.DLL on Win2K.
- Creates empty folder in user profile folder.
- Registers a ton of components in the registry.

But portable nonetheless. Fluffy, you wanna add this yourself, or would you like me to do it?

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Fluffy
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#4 Post by Fluffy »

Added to the database, thanks!

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nycjv321
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#5 Post by nycjv321 »

doesnt it require directx 9.0?

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Andrew Lee
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#6 Post by Andrew Lee »

Nope, 'cos my stock Win2K VM doesn't have DirectX 9 installed, and it runs OK.

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Fluffy
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#7 Post by Fluffy »

My guess is that the author mentioned that it's DX9-only since it's easier to point folks to DX9 than to inform them about GDI+. That's just my theory though. It's a nice little app, but it doesn't like bblean one bit (layering seems all screwed up).

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gp_hbk
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#8 Post by gp_hbk »

Fluffy wrote:My guess is that the author mentioned that it's DX9-only since it's easier to point folks to DX9 than to inform them about GDI+. That's just my theory though. It's a nice little app, but it doesn't like bblean one bit (layering seems all screwed up).
No desklets application works right with BBLean

appsuser
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Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:51 pm

#9 Post by appsuser »

I don't believe the AveDesk program is 100% portable. I'm certain it may work fine when used on different computers, but the problem I encountered was having it at different locations on the same computer...

When trying out a portable app I usually download it to a temp directory, run it, and if I like it I'll move it to my main portable application directory. This should be no problem if the app is really portable. However, when I did this with AveDesk I noticed it started acting "flaky". My status bar icon no longer appeared when I ran the program (it was just blank) and programs like ASuite were all of a sudden showing a constant presence in the taskbar (instead of just minimizing to an icon like normal). I looked into the registry to see if there was something being stored there and I found a *lot* of registry entries, many which had stored the value of the old application folder location (my temp directory).

I don't know how trivial these saved settings are, but I for one don't like it when a portable program starts acting flaky just because it's now located in a different location on the host computer, because drive letters aren't always constant for portable devices. BTW, I'm running Windows XP, and I did modify the .ini file as in the installation instructions.

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