Back in an earlier blog post, Portable Applications – a Convenient Necessity, I wrote about some of the benefits of portable applications and some of the ones that I like to use. If you decided to get into portable apps you may have been faced with the dilemma of having to keep each application up to date, especially when most do not include any sort of self-updating functionality.
Now you could go an manually check the PortableApps website for an update for each application but let’s be honest, who has the time to do that? Luckily, there is a solution.
Whilst the name might be bland, Portable Software Updater does exactly as you would expect. This little application comes in under half a megabyte and scans the folder in which it is placed as well as subfolders for the applications installed and then checks for an update. You have several options in how you want to handle updates, specifically:
- check for updates only,
- check for updates and download only,
- check for updates and run the installation,
- check for updates and silently install.
At the moment, there are specific applications that are supported by Portable Software Updater so you will still need to manually check for updates for applications not covered. Having said that, all of the major pieces of software (like Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Gimp and OpenOffice) seem to be present so in most cases you should be fine.
One niggle that I have found is that when I have set Portable Software Updater to check for updates and silently install I am unable to type capital letters on my keyboard nor can I use peripheral keys like the Windows key for shortcuts. I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this issue but it is an annoyance (especially if I am trying to blog).
That issue aside, this can be a great little time saver. You can download a copy of Portable Software Updater from Nozavi’s Apps here.
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