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Gianluca Administrator Posts: 1313
3 days ago
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Thank you for your question, it allows me to delve into SyMenu's history.
At one point, I added a plugin to download apps from PortableApps.com, naively believing that a community promoting openness and freeware would genuinely embrace those principles.
However, the PA community is an unusual case because it's owned by an individual and operates as a private company, despites the license telling us something different. The boss wants the PA apps to be available only via the PA launcher, otherwise, you can fu**k off.
Despite giving credit, backlinks, and visibility to PA.com I was accused of being a thief because I used to waste PA's bandwidth (???WTF???). I was discredited, accusing me of distributing software against their license (???##!!). PA's founder, smiling John, embedded code in every PAF app to block execution if launched through SyMenu. Since the malicious code was in the packer for PAF this sabotage extended to apps like OpenOffice, even though portable OpenOffice is packed and distributed by its own foundation, not by PA.
For these reasons, I decided to move on and remove the plugin.
Meanwhile, SPS suites were evolving. Initially, there were three of them: SyMenu Suite, NirSoft, and Sysinternals. It became soon clear to me that thematic suites, focused on specialized areas, were more practical than publisher-specific suites. And in fact integrating Sysinternals into the main suite proved beneficial. NirSoft still remains separate, but merging it into the main suite is a thing I have to do in the future.
Thematic suites instead open exciting possibilities: a forensic suite, a school tools suite, an office suite, or even a suite dedicated to games. But, managing a single generic suite is already overwhelming, which has kept me from pursuing thematic suites further.
That said, I introduced the concept of custom suites for users, that is probably the thing you want to know.
Custom suites are simple: users can define an online endpoint for their SPS library, similar to SyMenu's endpoint.
Your endpoint might look like:
https://www.mypersonalwebsite.com/getSPSSuite
Once the endpoint is entered in SyMenu, the system queries it to retrieve suite details, including its name, description, download links, and login requirements (if restricted to certain users).
As you can see, with this kind of feature, I have no control over these custom suites.
For example, if someone uses SyMenu to distribute pirated software I can't prevent it. Absurdly if smiling John decides to use SyMenu to distribute PA because SyMenu is way better than PA launcher, I can't prevent it  It'd be hilarious!
However, this lack of control isn’t why the custom suite is still inactive. The real reason is simple: there's been no demand for this feature, despite its potential to push SPS technology further and I need to work with someone to put it in line because it's huge and complex.
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Gianluca Administrator Posts: 1313
3 days ago
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rjtemple wrote:
So in short I would need to:
1) compile programs as .SPS
2) host a site
3) put those .SPS files on the hosted site
Would this be an accurate understanding?
Not exactly. It's easier than this.
1) SPS is not a packer such as PAF or zip/7zip/rar solid archive, and it's neither a setup like InnoSetup or msi.
It's a structured description that tells SyMenu where to download the file, how to unpack it, and where to find the resulting executable. Plus it contains program description, license, and so on.
The burden to create something with PAF, setup, or whatever other system, is that you have to repack the program at every update. With SPS instead you just need to change some strings of text inside the SPS file itself.
You can find a lot of material to understand what a SPS is and naturally you can download the magic SPS Builder from SyMenu itself or from its own page (https://www.ugmfree.it/spsbuilder)
2) Easier. You don't need an entire website but some sort of web service, one endpoint, that returns json information. The json information can be dynamically created or fixed... so in the simpler scenario you need to publish somewhere a plain text file.
3) ... or in any kind of file hosting depending on how you want to distribute your suite.
rjtemple wrote:
Could the site used be something as simple as Dropbox?
The endpoint can be hosted anywhere, even in Dropbox if you link a direct URL and not the dropbox download page.
rjtemple wrote:
There are not many products that I cannot get through SyMenu...
Excuse me but there's a more direct way to have what you need in SyMenu. Probably this is the reason because we don't still have the custom suite feature. You can become an SPS editor for the main SyMenu suite.
The SyMenu suite is open to collaboration from everyone.
So you have to download the SPS Builder, try to understand how it works by consulting some existing SPS, fill your SPS, upload it through the SPS Builder.
When a new SPS from a fresh editor arrives in the system, I'll be notified and review the work, help the new editor to understand how SPS really works, eventually ask for corrections, and afterwards publish his work.
As I told you the custom suite is a feature not activated because it needs a lot of work so today the only way to publish something is through the main suite.
edited by Gianluca on 28/03/2025
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