How far away is a portable version?

I just installed it and discovered that it’s writing stuff into the appdata directories. Is there a plan to make a portable version?

Also there were generic DIP 16, 14, 18 parts in the obsolete areas but not the core parts??? Kind of weird because DIP is far from obsolete. Is that intentional?

What constitutes “portable” in this context? I didn’t like it writing on my system disk and thus used hard links to move the roaming and appdata directories to another volume. If that constitutes portable then I can supply the commands to do it. As to part 2 the generic 8 pin DIP IC in core is changeable via inspector to be whatever you want. Drag it onto the breadboard then in inspector set the number of pins you want and the spacing .3, .6 or .9 as I recall (don’t know what .9 is for though).

Peter Van Epp

Portable means portable, it’s a somewhat standard concept. It is genuinely a showstopper for me as i’m often jumping from computer to computer with my programming projects on a usbkey. I was thinking it might replace pen and paper which suffers no such issue.

For the sake of having a simple parameter setting in the application to replace appdata it is likely it’s driving a few away who might otherwise contribute. Say by adding parts like the attinyx4 series.

I hope this is taken as constructive feedback.

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I’m still unclear on what you think is missing. I can’t think of an application that will write its data to a random file system that may or may not be there (i.e. a usb key). If you are willing to have to always have the usb key mounted for Fritzing to work, then the hard link method should do what you want just fine. As would copying appdata and roaming (it needs both very likely) to the usb key manually (although that isn’t as automatic). If the usb isn’t present Fritzing will likely hang or complain about not being able to write files but that will be true of any application in a similar situation. I should also point out I’m just a random new user not a developer :slight_smile: . The application itself is indeed static as far as I can see (modulo parts update, but it does that on startup) so there shouldn’t be any problem with having appdata and roaming on a USB key that I can see, mine happens to be a different partition on the system disk but a USB key should do almost as well (it will be a lot slower than my Sata drive though at writing files).

Peter Van Epp

I can’t think of an application that will write its data to a random file system that may or may not be there

No application ever needs to write data to a random filesystem. There is one singularly constant location true to every situation with no permissions issues or any of the other hiccups associated with a non-portable install. The directory where the .exe is. It’s always there.

All user settings should be under that for a portable install. Like Arduino and it’s portable folder.

Be aware I started up fritzing for a basic schematic and the parts I wanted to use weren’t in it. I started to create them and realised they weren’t saved with the application which means that when I pulled my key and stuck it in one of my other machines all my custom parts were left behind. And good quality USB3 keys are fast.

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I still don’t see a problem here. If you are satisfied with the speed of the USB drive and the fact the Fritzing (or any other application) is likely to hang if it isn’t mounted, then put in the hard links pointing to your USB key and problem solved. If version skew is a concern I expect you could install Fritzing on the USB key (in a third directory) as well and run the application from there which should let you run on pretty much any machine of the same architecture (actually, no that won’t work come to think of it, the hard links need to be installed on the actual target machine, but the rest should still be true). I don’t think (but haven’t tried it either) that it needs to be on the system disk. As to why the user directories aren’t in the directory with the .exe, that gets overwritten during upgrades and they didn’t want to impact the user’s data. Seems a sensible choice to me. You are correct, (at least in my view) that Fritzing’s most pressing current problem is more parts and the more people working on making them the better. Thus this discussion.

Peter Van Epp

A key can legitimately get a different drive letter each time it’s inserted so any sort of link is not an option.

Then I guess you are indeed up the creek. Although I’m also unsure how the application could deal with this anyway.

Peter Van Epp

You are totally missing this guys’ point.

Portable means the program itself is not installed on a given computer;
it is instead run from the USB drive.

Scenario:
I use several computers at work and need VNC Portable as well as several other tools.
The architecture of a portable app allows me to plug in my USB storage drive, and run portable programs FROM my USB drive;
never having to install on a shared computer.

All due respect;
This isn’t exactly a new concept.

I would LOVE a portable version of Fritzing.