In build
What we’re building next
Four Windows tools, all of them running on your own machine, all of them the same deal as everything else here. Three are small and nearly done. One is large and is not.
There are no release dates on this page on purpose. A date set by one person with a day job is a guess, and a published guess becomes a promise the moment somebody reads it. When a tool is ready it appears on the site; until then it is listed here and nothing more is claimed.
Nearly there
Written, in daily use on the machine they were built on, and waiting on packaging and documentation rather than on code.
Great Scott Capture Free
Press one key and the screenshot is already on your clipboard. No overlay to drag, no editor opening, nothing stealing focus — which matters, because the menu or tooltip you were trying to capture disappears the moment something else takes the foreground. Three keys, ascending with the size of the shot: the active window, the one screen you are working on, or every monitor as a single image. Windows has no built-in shortcut for that middle one.
Each capture goes to the clipboard and to a folder at the same time, named for the window it came from, so it is pasteable now and findable later.
Great Scott Recorder Free
Two buttons. Record screen asks which monitor, hides its own window so it is never in the picture, and records that screen with the sound your PC is playing and your microphone, to an MP4. Record audio only does the same without the picture, to an M4A.
A hotkey stops a recording from anywhere, and with nothing recording it repeats the last kind on the last screen without opening a window at all. The tray icon turns red while it is running, so you cannot forget it is.
EdgeDock Free, with a paid tier
A rail of shortcuts that lives on the edge of your screen, slides out when you reach for it, and hides again when you don’t. Named sections collapse, so thirty shortcuts stay one icon wide. Shortcuts keep working after you delete them from the desktop, which is the point — the desktop goes back to being a desktop.
It takes shortcuts, files, folders and links. Not running apps, not a clock, not weather, not system meters. It is a shortcut rail, and it stays one.
The free version is the whole rail, not a demo of one. EdgeDock Pro adds multiple rails and multiple profiles for people who want them.
Further out
A much larger program. Real work is done; a long way is left.
The photo app that finds the picture
Thirty thousand photos and no idea which folder the one you want is in. HelmSmith searches by what is actually in the picture rather than by filename, opens the formats a browser gives up on — HEIC off a phone among them — and edits without shipping your family photos to anyone’s server. It is a viewer, an editor and an organiser, which is three programs’ worth of work, and that is why it is in this section rather than the one above.
In build · name not final · no dateThat link takes your name and email and nothing else, and uses them for one thing: an email when HelmSmith is ready. The list is never sold, rented, shared, or pointed at any other product. Leaving it takes one click. The privacy page says the same thing at greater length, and means it the same way.
What “coming soon” means here
Every tool on this page is built the same way as the ones already shipping: it runs on your machine, it has no account, it makes no network request it does not need, and the free ones are free because they are free — not because a paid version is being withheld inside them.
None of them will arrive with a subscription attached. If a tool here is listed as free it will still be free a year after it ships, and the paid one will be a price you pay once. That is not a launch offer; it is the only business model this company has.