Portable Adium for Mac1.3.2r4.0

I don't understand why developers over at Adium spend time working on this kind of thing while the "normal" version of Adium still doesn't support webcam! I don't think there should be anything else on their minds right now... Not having a decent, multi-protocol (MSN, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, ICQ, Live, Gtalk, MySpace...) program on mac that also supports webcams is the only thing what makes me feel limited today as a mac owner. Besides, getting portable versions of apps isn't exactly something I long for all day or have any use for. I'm sorry if this comment hurts someone's feelings, or if I come out as annoying, but that's how I feel.

When Safari downloaded this, it had a '.bz2' extension, even though the file was actually the dmg itself! I just deleted '.bz2' from the name of the file and then it opened and mounted. Installation of the application itself by drag and drop was OK to my windows-formated USB drive (FAT 32) and it all works same as desktop version after transferring preferences, including OTR encryption. Great! If this extra '.bz2' extension happens to you *do not* double click the file while it is still named with the '.bz2' extension--that will just launch a process that actually messes up the dmg and renders it unreadable by the system.

GGore: That's your mac behaving, not the software. It may be that you need to do a repair permissions (google it) SIXTYK: I believe the only thing involved, is changing the location for saving your profile from ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0 to //[insert portable device]/Adium. By just copying or zipping and copying Adium, you would only be able to open the program, and would lose chat history, scripts, etc. This is the reason. It is not just about being able to copy it from one computer to another. In that case it is a lot easier to just copy the software. I believe this is the reason, but I haven't even tried the software.

This is an honest question and not an attempt to badmouth. I am sorry if it appears otherwise. I guess I am just curious as to what is involved in making these applications "portable." Many of these portable programs have been posted by the same developer but not the developer(s) who actually created Adium, Firefox, etc. I understand that the source code for most of these programs are publicly available under Open Source. I'm not accusing the developer(s) of any sort of infringement. I simply wish to understand what is involved in making these programs portable. Are files packaged differently? Are there changes to the programming itself? As I said, I'm just curious.

also one way around this is to archive it into a .zip file... place it on your thumb drive, and expand the file on your zip drive

It won't let me copy the folder to my USB thumbdrive, says "one or more items can't be copied". Maybe not quite ready for primetime.