Saturday, November 01, 2008

Bye, Bye U3

I was enamored with my U3 USB drive. It really did work well for me but my primary use was for KeePass. KeePass doesn't directly support U3. There are a couple of independently done U3 packages but I couldn't figure out how to incorporate my backup plugin. I had created my own package but it didn't use the U3 wrapper to shut down KeePass when I used the U3 launchpad to eject the drive.

And then when I handed my drive to somebody to share a file with them, I had to tell them to hold down the shift key while they inserted it so the U3 launchpad wouldn't run. They'd always look at me like I was from Mars.

Then my wife lost (and then found) the cap to her USB drive she runs Allway Sync from. So I started searching for her a USB drive that didn't need a cap.

I came across Super Talent's Pico-C.

I got her one at SuperMediaStore. Believe it or not, they're cooler than they look.
I had to have one myself.

So I got an 8GB from SuperMediaStore and moved my content over to it.

But wait, now I needed a menu!

I've used a couple of PortableApps but while they worked great, I didn't like the branding. I thought maybe I could use their menu system and delete all the branded stuff. Then I stumbled across PStart.

Perfect. The menu starts empty and you can just right click and add items. There's lots of flexibility to tailor the menu. There are just 2 files involved: PStart.exe and PStart.xml.

It's so clean. It puts an icon in the system tray (I'll get to how in another post.) A single left click brings up this menu.
A left double-click brings up the "panel."
Hitting Esc even dismisses this panel!

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