Hello Ilias,
Thank you for the complimentary remarks and for your sympathy with our
way of thinking.
To your two questions - you can run Topicscape on multiple machines
and have your Topicscapes on a removable hard disk. Provided you make
sure the logical drive is the same on each machine, you should
experience no problem. Even if the logical drives are different, the
inconvenience is minor (see below). So for practical purposes it is
portable. But it does make use of the Windows registry for several
purposes relating to performance and user convenience, so we do not
claim that it is a portable application in the sense you mean.
Many users do have their Topicscapes on a USB drive of some type and
transport them between home and work. We have more information about
this here:
http://www.topicscape.com/topicscape-wiki/index.php?title=Thumb-drives_supported
and it applies to portable USB hard drives as well as flash drives.
For this purpose, we allow two installations with one license provided
only one is in use at a time.
Topicscapes have a default parent folder, named My Topicscapes unless
you change it on the first run. But they do not have to be in that
folder. You can start a Topicscape from wherever it is, provided it
is in its own folder - which is needed for various files describing
user customizations and descriptive data (if these are missing it will
not break, but will warn you and then make them with default
settings).
You can also permanently move the My Topicscapes folder as described
here:
http://www.topicscape.com/topicscape-wiki/index.php?title=Moving_%22My_Topicscapes%22
On relative paths, that is entirely in your hands. You have three
options each time you introduce files or folders - and Topicscape asks
you which you want. If you choose Move or Copy, the paths will indeed
be relative, as you want. Moving that Topicscape's folder will not
break the Topicscape. If you choose Link, the path is absolute.
Then, of course if you move the prortable disk to another machine, it
won't be able to find the file. Sometimes users do not want to commit
a file to Topicscape, but they do want to reach it from within
Topicscape, and Link provides that option. New users often start out
with Link, before they are ready to have their files controlled by
Topicscape. They get all the visibility that Topicscape brings
without having to make a commitment to Topicscape controlling their
files.
But we always recommend the Move option, precisely because Links, like
Windows shortcuts, can easily be broken. The Move and Copy options
are more robust and Move avoids the risk of having copies that drift
out of alignment.
So yes, you can move Topicscapes around, but you do need to install
Topicscape on both PCs where it will be used.
I hope that covers everything, but let me know if not.
Argey