A small catalogue,
kept by hand

The idea

Why a hand-kept catalogue in the first place

The desktop did not stop mattering. Most serious work still happens in a window on a machine you own, and the software that supports it — the archiver, the search tool, the office suite, the driver that makes the screen look right — is still chosen one program at a time.

What changed is the route to it. Discovery moved to pages assembled for search engines rather than readers: enormous lists, download buttons that are advertisements, descriptions copied from a press release in 2014. The programs are fine. Getting to them safely has become the hard part.

ToolHarbor is our answer, kept deliberately small. A handful of shelves, six or so entries each, a few guides, and a directory of longer write-ups. Small enough that we can actually re-check it.

How an entry earns its place

We only list software we have installed and used on a real machine for real work. Beyond that, four questions decide it:

• Is it maintained? A release or meaningful commit within roughly the last year, or a clear statement that the tool is finished and stable.
• Is the source unambiguous? An official site or repository we can link to directly, with releases published there rather than on a mirror.
• Is the licence honest? Free means free. Where a paid tier exists, the free tier must still be genuinely useful, and we say so.
• Does it beat the built-in option? If the operating system already does the job well, we would rather tell you that than pad a list.

Entries that fail a re-check are removed rather than quietly left in place. A catalogue that only grows is a catalogue nobody is reading.

What we will not publish

No cracks, keygens, licence bypasses or activation workarounds, and no links to sites that traffic in them. No repackaged installers of our own — we describe software and point at the developer's release page, and that is the entire mechanism.

We also avoid the review-mill habits: no ranked "top fifty" lists generated for search traffic, no scores invented to look objective, and no entry added because someone paid for it. Nothing in the catalogue is sponsored.

Corrections

Software changes: projects are abandoned, licences shift, a free tier gets trimmed. When you notice something out of date before we do, tell us — corrections are the main reason the catalogue stays accurate. Write to us via the contact page and include the entry and what changed.

The site itself

Plain HTML and CSS, one small script for the navigation and a couple of animations. No trackers beyond basic analytics, no advertising network, nothing that follows you to the next site. It loads quickly because there is very little of it.