OStatic

From my perspective, one of the best developments in technology during 2008 was the proliferation of new portability options for useful software applications. This was driven by the push toward cloud computing, netbooks (which typically don't store a lot of local resources but do a good job of reaching out to online applications), the availability of low-cost, high-capacity USB thumb drives, and more. We've written about the new version 3.0 of the open source OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, which has been available for a while. If you'd like to be able to use these applications without necessarily having them loaded on your portable computer wherever you are, here are two good options.

For a while now, I've been toting a USB thumb drive around in my pocket loaded with my favorite applications, and backups of important files. It's amazing how much capacity you can get with these little gadgets now, for very little money.

In this post, I'll cover good, free open source applications that you can store on a thumb drive. You can also use this post to put more than 50 open source applications in your pocket in one hour. Once you have enough of these with you at all times, you can stop thinking about your computer being where you store all your favorite applications, because you can use your favorites anywhere. Let's start out with the truly remarkable PortableApps.com Suite.