This thing bugging me for month actually… It’s annoying to see more and more people uses Thinstall to create portables. Not that I have anything against Thinstall, but, check this out from Thinstall website:
Thinstall supposedly for these peoples:
- Corporate IT
- ISV & Software Publishers
and it should stay that way. But with available hacked trial of Thinstall Virtualization Suite and cracks/patches on the Internet, anybody that can get their hands on those files can make portable, and I mean CAN make portable because the simplicity of Thinstall.
After seeing some of those Thinstalled apps, these newbies, they never tried to make an app portable the normal way, EVEN if the app works just fine normal way. The main purposes of Thinstall (AFAIK) are:
1) deploy app without footprints on host PC with Isolation & Sandboxing
2) In the portable world, means that virtually almost all apps can be made portable (for example, M$ Office)
So these peeps, they just fire up Thinstall, pre-scan, install the apps and post-scan. Then they click on Build.bat to create the output EXE. Sure, it was an easy task, 1 2 3… right… but does they realize, if Thinstall ceases to exist, what they’ll depend on next? So they’ll be useless without the help of Thinstall. Almost every single app that they can find will be converted into portable using Thinstall, even the good-old Winamp 2.x and other app like UltraISO (which I think is not hard to make it portable NORMAL way)
In other hands, if you at least learned one of the other ways making portables, you always have alternatives. Most great portable makers I’ve known (and some I barely knowns) know at least one alternatives such as through AutoIT, batch scripting etc.
In my humble opinion, I think people that only know making portables with Thinstall are people that didn’t uses their brain. Everything has been taken care of by Thinstall, from files placements, shared dlls and registries. You brain will only uses maybe 0.000000001% to instruct your finger to left-click the mouse on the Build.bat file. That way, you’ll never learned problem-solving and will always depend on the others to solves your problem.
In other method, sure you’ll spend alot of times in fronts of your PC try making them working, but that’s what making your brain functioning. You’ll face with every problems you can encounter with particular app and learned to solve it the hard-earned way…
Well, that was my 2 cents to share with you guys, if you guys didn’t agree with me or want to comments, please do reply. I would love to see some discussion about this…