Greetings fellow JBidwatcher fans,
This is my first post here and I am making it because I am a big fan of portable software and JBidwatcher. Unfortunately JBidwatcher is not portable at the current time and so I had been searching the forums in hope that someone else might have been looking for the same thing as me, this brought me to a post by CyberFOX (http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/9/topics/1229) where he recommended setting the “user.home” property by passing a parameter when starting JBidwatcher. This works half-way, some functions such as the report a bug do not work, while others do (I have mainly tried it with JBidwatcher 2). Anyway I decided I would share my findings so far and then maybe someone might have some suggestions on why portable JBidwatcher fails on some parts.

I ended up writing “java -jar -Duser.home=.\ -Xmx512m JBidwatcher.jar” and saving the file as a .cmd file in the same folder as JBidwatcher. This makes the launched JBidwatcher use the folder it is run from with no consideration to the paath. I like jar files more then exe files when using Java applications so that is the reason for my choice of jar instead of exe, but it shouldn’t make a difference. This is as far as I have come and it works, sort of, as mentioned some parts does not work. I have barely tried it with JBidwatcher 1 and while I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work there I also have not tried it enough to say for sure.

Now the .bat/.cmd file has 2 issues, one is that will leave a command window running in the background and while most people would prefere not to have this, it might actually be positive thing because you get a realtime log of what is happening in JBidwatcher. The second one is that you have to run a .cmd file instead of an exe file which might create problems with certain portable launchers. Because of this I decided to create a launcher that runs the same command, but is an exe file. You can find it here http://wikisend.com/download/510856/JBidlaunche… but it will only be available for 90 days. I released the launcher under the same license as JBidwatcher 2 and even borrowed an icon from JBidwatcher, I hope this is ok, but if it isn’t then please tell me and I will of course remove it. The launcher will look in the same directory for a file called either JBidwatcher.jar or JBidwatcher.exe and launch it with the “user.home” property set to the launching folder. Should there be both a JBidwatcher.jar and a JBidwatcher.exe file in the same folder then it will always launch the jar file. This launcher will not leave any command window running, but still suffers from the problem with some functions not working. I look forward to any feedback and hopefully some ideas on why this is not working.

Greetings,
JBidwatcher 2.0 actually takes a command-line parameter, ‘--usb’, which does exactly that, uses the current directory instead of the ‘user.home’ directory.

You should be able to create a typical Windows Shortcut with that parameter and put it on your USB drive with the .exe version.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Thank you for your help, this was exactly what I was looking for and even though I tried to find exactly that, I must have missed it. The command-line parameter “—usb” works perfectly and so I see no reason to use the old method except for JBidwatcher 1 which will soon be obsolete anyway. I have created a new launcher which is the same as the old one except that it only works with JBidwatcher 2 and uses the usb command-line parameter instead (the new launcher is located at http://wikisend.com/download/536002/JBidlaunche… and will only be available 90 days from now, just in case someone else should need such a thing too). I know I could make a shortcut, but as mentioned I have a launcher which accept only exe files and do not allow the passing of command-line parameters so I need individual launchers for several applications. Hopefully I was not the only one looking for a portable version of JBidwatcher and so this thread might have helped others too.

PS. Congratulations on becoming a father CyberFOX, wish you and your family all the best. Also keep up the good work you’ve done on JBidwatcher.