Put your portable apps on a diet with AppCompactor

I'm a big fan of John T. Haller's Portable Apps.com, and I was very excited by one of the apps that appeared in its RSS feed last night: AppCompactor.

It is, of course, portable, open source, and designed to integrate with the PortableApps suite. AppCompactor fuses UPX (for exe, dll, and other binary files) and 7zip (for jar and zip files) to compress portable applications. Not surprisingly, it's been used to package the other programs in the suite.

Using the default options, AppCompactor reduced my CCleaner portable folder to about 760k (about 40% its original size) and pummeled my ArtWeaver to trifling 3.1mb - a 10mb reduction. Both programs launched much more quickly from my Kingston Data Traveler, and they functioned exactly as they had before: no errors, no headaches.

AppCompactor can't work it's magic on everything, though. It didn't manage to reduce a single byte with FastStone Capture or Spybot, and it only reduced AdAware SE by 60kb. For curiosity's sake, I also tried portable version of Photoshop CS3 and Office 2003, and had little success with them either, saving only about 1mb on each.

Since it utilizes UPX, apps that were previously packaged using that type of compression (like the Gimp or Firefox) probably won't see an appreciable reduction.

Still, when it does work, it's fantastic. It's an incredibly simple way to boost launch times for some of your portable apps and provide extra megs of free space on your flash drive. A few megs might not seem like much on a 16 or 32gb drive, but space is space - and more is always welcome in my book.