Mac Flash Drive? How Portable Are You Really?

Size doesn’t matter. Smaller is better. Everything I need is in my pocket.

2006 is the year of portable applications for your Mac, so you can carry your Mac life with you everywhere you go.

It’s one thing to have a notebook (we can’t call them laptops anymore—there’s some deal about your lap catching on fire), it’s something else to carry a Mac that’s smaller than your iPod.

Enter the year of the flash drive and portable Mac applications. Have you gone portable? No, not MacBook portable.

Portable as in portable applications you carry on a flash drive the size of a keychain fob.

One, two, and four gigabyte flash drives are available these days, which is more than sufficient to carry many essential Mac applications and most data to go with each.

“Excuse me, Carol. A flash drive with Mac applications?” Yep. Copy your applications and data to a flash drive and carry it with you.

Once you arrive wherever you’re going, plug in your apps to a Mac via the USB connector and you’re good to go.

Borrowing someone else’s Mac is the only trick and the essential applications you’d need on the road travel with you and your keys.

Portable Mac applications are all the rage these days.

A quick search of MacUpdate reveals well over a dozen essential Mac apps ready for portability, plug, and play.

Start with Portable AbiWord, the popular open source word processor small enough to fit on a flash drive.

One of my favorite utility applications is Adium, the iChat-anywhere-anyhow application. Fully portable these days.

Portability means a special version of the Mac application designed for on-the-go users; lean, mean, ready for action.

Just like Bambi a decade or two ago.

For browser lovers there’s Portable Camino and Portable Firefox. For email, there’s Portable Thunderbird.

“Wait a minute, Carol. Everyone uses Microsoft Office, and I bet there’s not a portable version of that, right?” You’re right. You win.

There’s a portable version of OpenOffice, though. Even a portable version of Gimp, the open source Photoshop wannabe.

RSS readers are everywhere and portable versions such as RSSowl and Feed are ready for download.

The price is right, too, as virtually all of the portable versions are either open source or free.

Need to do some web page editing? No problemo. Portable Nvu to the rescue. It’s not Dreamweaver, but it works well, and is less filling.

All of these applications are smaller versions of their full-sized brothers. Depending on the size of your flash drive, you could get ‘em all stored away safely, posing as part of your key chain.

The portable process is rather straightforward. Just plug in your flash drive to an appropriate Mac USB connector. The flash drive will mount and look just like any other disk running on a Mac.

Double click and you’re running.

Portability is here to stay, though not without some issues. You’ll still need to find a Mac you can use when you’re away from yours.

How portable are you these days? Do you use a thumb sized flash drive to backup important data? Do you carry applications and data on a thumb-sized drive? How much did you pay? What do you use the flash drive for? How easy is it to find a Mac you can use while you’re away from yours?

As always, more questions than answers.