I just stumbled across Ceedo. At first look it seems like a hybrid between U3 (without all the U3 mess), and a typical System Tray App Launcher (like PStart), but much more pretty (like U3).

They boast a huge set of portable applications, all of which seem to be the standard set floating around today.

IMHO, we dont really need another launcher, especially a pretty one which costs $30.  It has no Mac support, not even the Tablet XP edition (seems strange to me).  We simply need more apps to become more portable friendly.

No SDK nor API, which seems superior over U3 which requires you to package up your applications in a very specific way.  With Creedo it seems that you can just add any application in via their interface to have it added to the drive/menuing system - thats nice.  PStart works slightly in that fashion as well.

No synchronization/backup component.  This (as I have found out) is quite necessary for trusted computers.  I actually purchased GoodSync just for this purpose and keep a full backup of my pen drive on my machine at home all the time.

They boast some sort of "application virtualization", interesting since most applications do rely on the local filesystem (My Documents, etc..), System Environment Variables, and the Registry I can see this being a tough task to handle.  Unfortunately most applications they list are "experimental only".  There are some wrapper stub/launchers which have the ability to trap these calls and redirect them but IMHO that is still a work in progress.  The security aspect of all this is quite significant as well.  A non-admin will have significantly less privileges as the administrator on the system, which causes headaches for many Portable applications and environments.


Their technology page states:

Ceedo Operating Environment - Micro-OS installed on portable media which provides services to applications installed on it. The Ceedo Operating Environment contains the Ceedo Core mechanism, a vitalization method handling all the necessary operational aspects for a single application.

Now that seems contradictory to what they indicated previously.  Is it a virtualized Operating System or Application Environment?  Or is the Virtual OS wrapping the Application Environment? 

Another major issue with this type of launcher/app manager is its ability to handle constant updates of a whole variety of software which people will stuff on their drives.  For example if you look in their Programs Directory you will notice that Mozilla Firefox is listed at version 1.5.0.7 which is quite outdated at this time (I have 2.0.0.1 running right now).  I dont think I would call it a flaw in the software, more of like an issue it must deal with gracefully.

They have been getting a whole lot of press lately, so maybe there is something too it; I will have to give it an install and see how it goes.  The thing with the press is that they usually jump onto some good ideas, but they focus on bad implementations.  Lets hope this is a decent implementation.

I should also take a deeper look at the Portable Apps Launcher.

Lastly, it is possible to run both Windows XP (via BartsPE) and Linux (via DSL & Qemu or any other smaller distro) on your USB Pen Drive.  Currently on my daily use drive I have both.  I need to work on the XP-Embedded version much more in order to get some sort of environment setup which I can work with.  I also want to test running Qemu with either OS in a non-admin setting.  If Qemu will run as non-admin then you can truly carry your OS around with you, including all your normally installed applications and it will work on a non-USB Boot compatible machine.

Mirror
 

1 Comment

• Dana Catly said Sunday, January 21, 2007 8:49:40 PM

  Please download version 2.1 from www.ceedo.com. TabletPC supported. Firefox is 2.X The whole concept of Virtualization is indeed in place, including same support on non admin pages. Give it a try !!!