10 Free Mini Apps–Perfect for a USB Thumb Drive
December 10th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 31 Comments
Do you carry a USB thumb drive with you at all times? If not, you should. You can get a lot of capacity for not much money, and keep your drive right on your keychain. These are great for backing up critical files, transferring files between computers, and more. Plus, if you canvas the world of free, open source software you can find a lot of cool applications with very small footprints that you can have on your pocket drive all the time. In this post, I’ll round up some of these miniature marvels, which you can load ultra-quickly for doing common tasks. The applications in this post are for Windows, and, in some cases Linux.
Qm from Pyric Interactive is an extremely small e-mail client, with a footprint of only 16K. It loads in an instant—faster than loading a browser-based e-mail client. You can also add it to your Send To menu for use with Internet Explorer, so you can fire off files to people without hassling within an e-mail client.
Miranda (774K) is a small, fast instant messaging client with support for almost all popular protocols. It’s designed to be resource efficient. It supports AIM, Jabber, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu and other instant messengers.
SpeakFreely (690K) is a small VoIP application. You can use it to conduct calls over the Internet or any TCP/IP network. It also comes with limited PGP capabilities, so you can encrypt your communications if you choose to.
IrfanView (822K) is one of the best graphics programs I’ve ever used, and you can even use it to create slideshows. It’s very fast to get into for tasks like working with screen captures and more. When I wrote about it before, lots of the readers agreed that it’s a great application.
FxFoto is a good application for editing and organizing photos, and it works with Windows Vista. It comes with lots of templates you can use to attractively archive your photos.
SG TCP Optimizer (596K) is a great little program for tuning and optimizing your Internet connection. It doesn’t need to be installed—just run it and optimize. It tweaks TCP/IP parameters in the Windows Registry and many other parameters so that you get the best performace possible on whatever Net connection you’re using.
RemotePad (248K) combines a plain text editor with an FTP client. You can use it to edit and upload text, download text, and move files around with colleagues.
ASFRecorder is a Windows Media streaming client with a footprint of 368K. It lets you download, store and manage files in .WMV, .WMA, .WMX and many other rich media formats. You can use it with Windows or Linux.
Text2HTML (240K) converts plain text to HTML. It’s especially fast and good at taking a bunch of text files and turning them all into HTML.
If you find yourself using your USB thumb drive on foreign computers a lot, TinyResMeter (92K) is a fast, easy way to guage the system resources available to you.
Do you have any good tips on small and fast applications for portable use?
31 Comments Post your own comment
Jesse says: December 10th, 2007 4:36pm
damn small linux too!
Mario Olckers says: December 10th, 2007 4:52pm
Please dont forget SumatraPDF as super lightweight PDF reader, its a definite must
viptormx says: December 10th, 2007 7:40pm
hi, i add “FastStone Photo Resize” is the excelent resizer picture portable; very until.
kevinzittle says: December 10th, 2007 7:50pm
Can we get some mac apps for us flash carriers on the other side?
GigaNET: USB Mini Apps, Ethanol, YouTube Rev - GigaOM says: December 10th, 2007 8:00pm
[...] by Edit Staff, Monday, December 10, 2007 at 8:00 PM PT Comments (0) WebWorkerDaily: 10 free mini apps that are perfect for that USB thumb drive on your [...]
Anup Sharma says: December 10th, 2007 9:04pm
I would suggest Foxit Reader (stand alone one)here. It is a great app, uses lil resource and greatest of all, it is portable. The size is around 3.31MB.
The PDFEdit, PDF editor from Foxit Software, is another great app in my repertoire. Size is only 696K.
What can we ask for?
Spot says: December 11th, 2007 12:56am
PortableApps (portableapps.com) is pretty good too!
yclipse says: December 11th, 2007 4:34am
I keep the following on my hard drive and copy most or all to each keydrive:
4NT command processor replacement, with many additional features
Atlantis RTF/DOC editor
cpp Command Prompt Portable - instant command line environment
EssentialPIM personal information manager
Locate32 indexes file names (not contents) for quick find
NoteTab plain text editor, HTML editor, with programmed clips
OffByOne web browser
Opera web browser
Powermarks bookmark manager
SumatraPDF quick PDF reader
TC GUI version of 4NT, above
TotalNotes combination of many things, including a browser
treepad tree-based editor
XMPlay MP3 player (not related to XM radio)
ZuluPadPro small personal wiki system
And, of course, “If_you_find_this.txt”, with instructions and a reward offer for safe return in case I lose the keydrive.
10 piccole applicazioni da utilizzare su una chiave USB says: December 11th, 2007 5:40am
[...] [via Web Worker Daily] [...]
Dave says: December 11th, 2007 5:50am
Hmmm, SG TCP Optimizer with its Registry tweaking does not sound like a good idea considering you are making permanent changes to the host OS’s registry. This sort of feels like it goes against the spirit of the idea of having your own apps on a USB stick.
Robert says: December 11th, 2007 6:10am
The programms I have on my USB are the mobile versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and TiddlyWiki - the only things I need when I’m away from my “devices”.
Anon. says: December 11th, 2007 2:09pm
Portable Apps is a nice application suite. I also am never without Keynote (greatest app EVER), and recently started using XAMPPLITE — nice little WAMP server on my USB drive. Very user-friendly.
Lifehack Digest for December 11 - lifehack.org says: December 12th, 2007 12:08am
[...] 10 Free Mini Apps–Perfect for a USB Thumb DriveWEbWorker Dailylists 10 tiny little apps, perfect for adding to your thumb drive “office” or just for running quickly and efficiently from your hard drive.Tags: apps tools [...]
lunigma says: December 12th, 2007 2:13am
MPUI! The only portable media player you need, period. End of discussion … no no no, don’t even try to bring up VLC or Media Player Classic. It’s over
Matthew Griffin says: December 12th, 2007 5:04am
I’ve been carrying around a USB drive for a while now and it’s already saved me more than a couple times. Thanks for the list and also thank to all the commenters for more great mini apps.
Business Hacks mobile edition says: December 12th, 2007 6:00am
[...] need to run a bit of software and you’re away from your primary PC. Web Worker Daily lists 10 free mini applications for USB drive-carrying road warriors, [...]
lo-fi librarian» Blog Archive » This Week’s Useful Tools says: December 16th, 2007 7:46am
[...] 10 free mini apps perfect for a USB thumb drive - Web Worker Daily. [...]
tommy says: December 18th, 2007 6:14am
TinyResMeter is excellent !!! I hope the 0.98 will be out soon with some more usefull features.
Frank says: December 20th, 2007 9:39pm
You may also want to give XnView a look at - http://www.xnview.com
…reminds me I should put it on my flash drive, I have it on all my hard drives…
Web Worker Daily » Archive Eleven Go-Anywhere Mini Applications for the Mac « says: December 27th, 2007 4:00pm
[...] 27th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean No Comments Recently, I did a post on tiny, free applications you can keep for stashing on a USB thumb drive, which, if you carry your [...]
Eleven Go-Anywhere Mini Applications for the Mac | WORK says: December 31st, 2007 4:38am
[...] I did a post on tiny, free applications you can keep for stashing on a USB thumb drive, which, if you carry your [...]
Mark says: December 31st, 2007 3:58pm
And nobody has mentioned truecrypt? So here: http://www.truecrypt.org/
iLibrarian » 21 Mini Apps for Your Thumb Drive says: January 7th, 2008 3:42pm
[...] applications are free and take up little space - perfect for a keychain drive. The first list, 10 Free Mini Apps–Perfect for a USB Thumb Drive, includes programs which can be run on [...]
21 Mini Apps for Your Thumb Drive « Libtech in LibrarianLand says: January 8th, 2008 8:33am
[...] applications are free and take up little space - perfect for a keychain drive. The first list, 10 Free Mini Apps–Perfect for a USB Thumb Drive, includes programs which can be run on [...]
Saad Amin says: January 10th, 2008 12:18pm
ya,thats greats collection of small but useful softwares,thanks a lot…
Free Software says: January 11th, 2008 6:41am
Good list of applications, not heard of many of them. Another good list can be found at http://www.freeapps.co.uk
Inky960 says: February 2nd, 2008 10:10pm
Yes–KeyNote, for sure. How do people LIVE without this little program? Also, “Jarte” - very cool word processor, with a flash-drive version to download!
Web Worker Daily » Archive One-Stop Shopping for Apps in Your Pocket « says: March 28th, 2008 4:50pm
[...] in my pocket at all times. I’ve written before about good tiny apps to tote for Mac users and Windows users. If you don’t want the hassle of choosing your own tiny apps to load for work-anywhere use, [...]
lo-fi librarian» Blog Archive » Do More With A USB Pen says: April 5th, 2008 9:30am
[...] 10 Free Mini Apps Perfect for a USB Thumb Drive - collection from Web Worker Daily [...]
Web Worker Daily » Archive 6 Free Cross-Platform Apps–for a USB Thumb Drive « says: April 25th, 2008 4:00pm
[...] No Comments I’ve posted before about good applications to put on a USB thumb drive, for both Windows and the Mac. If you work on a mobile basis frequently, this is a great way to have any application [...]
Web Worker Daily » Archive 5 Essentials for the Mobile Web Worker « says: May 2nd, 2008 4:02pm
[...] Thumb Drive. I’ve written before about useful applications to keep on a USB thum drive. I have one in my pocket at all times, and you can get 32GB of capacity [...]