While Jason and James duke it out over iGoogle vs Flock, I've been experimenting with portable apps on a thumb drive lately. I like this approach better than iGoogle because of privacy concerns and better than Flock because of portability.
There seem to be a couple of ways to go with the portable apps - U3 enabled, which require a U3 flash drive, and the open source portable apps from portableapps.com which install on any flash drive. Some apps, like Firefox and Thunderbird, are even available both ways. So things can get confusing and/or messy fast.
But with 2 GB U3 flash drives easily available for $20 or less, I've been having fun sorting through this mess and setting up my thumb drive with all my favorite apps. Especially now that I'm travelling without my laptop more, it's nice to know that I can have access to email and such on public computers without leaving sensitive information behind.
But wait - there's more! After setting up portable apps for windows I started wondering "What about macs?" What if I'm at an Apple Store and want to use iChat? How can I do this without having to go through an account set up and without leaving a trace on the host machine? Well, it turns out there are a number of portable apps for the Mac, too. And that someone has created portable versions of Apple apps including Safari, Mail and iChat - programs that should be on any mac - that use the application on the host machine but settings files on the flash drive. Unfortunately these aren't free, but for 99 cents a piece I think they're worth checking out.
I'll let you know how it goes.
UPDATE 12/3/07: I bought and installed the iChat and Safari portable apps for the mac. These use the application on the host machine but replace the settings files on the host machine with aliases to settings files on the thumb drive. When the app closes, it puts everything back the way it started.
My experience with these apps has been mixed. I went through a very frustrating period with the iChat app, where it worked on some machines but not others - or on some accounts on one machine, but not others. Eventually I figured out that if a ~/Library/Logs folder had never been created (because no app had ever crashed under that account, for instance), iChat would not open. The problem was solved by manually creating the Logs folder. But I shouldn't need to do that - the software shouldn't choke in this situation but should instead create the Logs folder for me. Apart from that, all was cool with iChat.
Safari mostly works fine, but setting the home page is a mystery to me. When I launched my portable Safari and set the home page, I found that the home page of Safari on the host machine got changed. And the next time I launched portable Safari on a different machine, my home page setting was gone. If anyone has any idea where Safari stores information about a user's home page (and it IS a user setting), I'd be very interested in hearing about it.