Portable applications in general are software and programs you can run independently from a removable drives (like flash/pen drive) without going through the hassle of installing them. They are widely used and have been a favorite approach for professionals of different various industries.

With portable applications, you can leave your laptop behind; plug in the thumb drive in any client machine, run the application without worrying about leaving anything behind. In this post, we attempt to show a collection of useful and free applications you can run independently from thumb drives, sorting by profession by general. You’ll be surprise how many applications you can actually run without installation. Full list after jump.

Portable Apps For Bloggers

1. Mozilla Firefox

   Mozilla Firefox, portable version allows you leave no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

   

2. Opera

   Full featured web browser, rapidly gaining popularity. Fully portable, keeping all data in its local folder.

   

3. Google Chrome

   

4. Portable Safari

   Portable Safari is packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you.

   

5. Windows Live Writer Portable

   Windows Live Writer Portable has all your blog settings, ping server settings and FTP settings to redo.

   

6. Zoundry Raven

   Zoundry Raven™ is the next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster.

   

7. FileZilla

   FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP and SFTP client. It includes a site manager and supports uploads/downloads queue, keepalive, timeout detection, SOCKS 4/5 and HTTP 1.1 proxy etc.

   

8. FeedReader

   Feedreader is a FREE RSS news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment.

   

9. GreatNews

   GreatNews displays full pages of news articles across rss feeds, optimized for fast reading.

   

10. Foxit Reader

    Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF viewer.

    

11. StickyTweets

    A lightweight Twitter client built in C/C++ with Win32. No additional frameworks required.

    

12. Fruitfultime Bookmark Manager

    Bookmark websites from any web browser with a global hotkey and bookmark documents, pictures, and other files with drag and drop ease.

    

13. Web Design Toy

    Web Design Toy provides a deceptively simple split-window layout. Whatever HTML is typed in the editor window is instantly shown in web-page form in the display window.

    

14. Lingoes Portable 2.6.2

    Lingoes Portable is green portable version of Lingoes released by Lingoes Project.

    

Portable Apps For Designers

1. GIMP Portable

   The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

   

2. Artweaver

   Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools.

   

3. MobaPhoto

   MobaPhoto is a nice freeware for managing your digital photos. MobaPhoto allows you to resize, crop, correct red-eyes of all your pictures very easily in "batch-mode".

   

4. Active Pixels

   Activepixels is a neat full-featured photo editor. Interesting auto enhance options (including shadow/hilight recovery), many filters, correction and denoise settings.

   

5. Photoscape

   Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

   

6. PhotoFiltre

   PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.

   

7. Fotografix

   An image editor that can be used for image enhancement and graphic design.

   

8. Anim8or

   Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program.

   

9. XBlender

   Blender is an integrated 3D creation software suite.
   It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content.

   

10. X-Inkscape

    Inkscape is a vector editor that supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.

    

11. Inkscape

    Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor.

    

12. Diagram Designer

    Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

    

13. FastStone Photo Resizer

    FastStone Photo Resizer enables users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

    

14. JPEGCrops

    JPEGCrops is a Windows program, created for preparation of a batch of images for printing. It provides lossless cropping with fixed aspects using jpegtran.

    

15. Riot

    Riot allows you to save images for web/email/other media with the best compression ratio and quality.

    

16. SmillaEnlarger

    SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality.

    

17. PNG Optimizer

    Png Optimizer creates PNG screenshots and make them easily available.

    

18. IcoFX

    IcoFX is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing.

    

19. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

    Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a professional, yet easy to use tool for designing and retouching icons, cursors, animations and static images, and assembling icon libraries.

    

20. WinSnap

    WinSnap includes easy capture of non-rectangular windows with customized and transparent backgrounds, simple and automatic canvas transformations, coloring effects, and the addition of eye-candy drop shadows.

    

21. PicPick Tools

    PicPick features a powerful capture tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and etc.

    

22. SiteShoter

    SiteShoter is a free tool that can be used to take a screenshot of any webpage.

    

23. Greenshot

    Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.

    

24. FastStone Image Viewer

    FastStone Image Viewer has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments.

    

25. IrfanView

    IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for beginners and powerful for professionals.

    

26. Cornice Portable

    Cornice Portable is an image viewer that has thumbnail previews, full screen modes, rotation, slideshow modes and more.

    

27. Osiva

    Osiva is a free image viewing program that opens and scale images fast — get images into view and out of the way

    

28. RealWorld Paint.COM

    RealWorld Paint.COM can display images using any zoom factor and always shows 100% accurate preview of the drawn shape. Tooltips are displayed throughout the user interface to explain meaning of controls.

    

29. AMP Font Viewer

    AMP Font Viewer is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts.

    

30. FotoSketcher

    FotoSketcher is a 100% free program which can help you convert your digital photos into art, automatically.

    

31. Dia Portable

    Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.

    

32. Oiko CSS-Editor

    Oiko is a visual CSS editor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows to separate the representation definitions of such structured documents as HTML, XHTML, XML from their content, which is an effective principle in the design of web sites.

    

Portable Apps for Business Purposes

1. OpenOffice.org

   OpenOffice.org Portable is a complete office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database

   

2. Notepad++

   Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

   

3. SoftMaker Office 2006

   An Office Suite which contains components that compatible with Windows Office applications like Word, Excel, etc.

   

4. PNotes

   PNotes is fast and light-weight. It has flexible settings – both for the program in whole and for individual note.

   

5. AbiWord

   AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

   

6. Jarte

   Jarte is a WordPad based, FREE word processor whose unique interface will make you feel like you are piloting a swift, nimble yacht by comparison.

   

7. Portable Office Exec

   

8. ToDoList

   A simple and effective way to keep track of your current programming tasks.

   

9. Task Coach

   Task Coach Portable lets you bring your to-do list and task manager with you so you always stay on top of things.

   

10. Date Reminder

    Date Reminder reminds you of recurring or nonrecurring events, like birthdays, bills to pay, appointments etc.

    

11. Sunbird

    Sunbird Portable is a standalone calendaring and task management application built on the same technology as the Firefox web browser.

    

12. Koma-Mail

    Koma-Mail is an email client which is comfortable and has very handy functions. It does not need an installation, so that you can run Koma-Mail from your flash drive but, of course, also on your desktop.

    

13. Thunderbird

    Mozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that’s easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more.

    

14. Qm – The Quick Mailer

    Qm – The Quick Mailer is a tiny program for sending quick e-mail messages without having to load your main email client program.

    

15. WinMerge

    WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

    

16. KeyDb

    Keydb is a password manager. With it you create and store strong random passwords required by many websites.

    

17. 7-Zip

    For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip

    

18. Express Burn

    Express Burn lets you create and record audio or data CDs with any CDRW drive.

    

19. Recover Files

    Recover Files is an award winning program that can undelete / recover deleted files after they have been deleted.

    

20. Team Talk

    TeamTalk allows you to talk to friends and colleagues using the internet as audio carrier. With TeamTalk any number of people can participate in a conversation and is only limited by the bandwidth you have available.

    

21. Blowfish Advanced CS

    One powerful file encryption and security tool for the Windows platform.

    

22. TrueCrypt

    TrueCrypt is a software application used for real-time on-the-fly encryption.

    

23. Tomahawk PDF+

    Tomahawk PDF+ is one of the most advanced word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform.

    

24. GnuCash Portable

    GnuCash Portable is the open source financial management software packaged as a portable app, so you can take your financial data with you.