At last month’s SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, PortableApps cleaned up, winning Best Commercial Open Source Project, Best Visual Design, Best Project, and Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything. Developer John T. Haller answers our questions.
What made you choose to make your project open source?
I’ve been a big fan of open source software for a long time, and have been a happy user of Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, Notepad++, FileZilla, and lots of other great packages. When I began working on PortableApps.com, it seemed only fair to make our portable additions open source. When I wrote the PortableApps.com Menu, I decided to open that up under the GPL too, to help the concept to grow far and wide.
What does your development environment (OS, IDE, etc.) look like?
My main development environment consists of a Windows Vista machine (quad-core, 5GB RAM, 2TB of hard drive space) with Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 2000, Ubuntu, and a few other distros running in VirtualBox virtual machines. Our menu is written in Delphi, so I use the Delphi IDE when working on that. I also use Notepad++ as my primary text editor for some of our Delphi code as well as our NSIS code. In addition, I use Microsoft Visual Studio for compiling some of our C++ stuff.
How long did it take you to develop your project and how many people contributed to it?
The project has been an ongoing work. While I wrote the initial menu in about a month, others are now contributing, and several months of work has gone into it. Our upcoming updater was written by four of us. The applications are packaged by a team of nearly two dozen developers. We have nearly four dozen translators who have helped us make our software available in as many languages.
How many open source projects have you worked on? What is your favorite?
I’ve only consistently worked on PortableApps.com. I’ve made a couple of minor bug reports and patches or icon sets for things like NSIS, Wine, Firefox, and some Drupal modules. But PortableApps.com is my favorite, because we have such a passionate and dedicated community.
Which application would you most like to include that you don’t right now?
There’s no one specific app at the moment, so we’ll go with … everything on SourceForge.net!