Cool Tools is an organization with the purpose of building tools to advance the frontier of personal computing. We believe that personal software tools amplify humanity's potential to solve the world's problems.
It's astonishing how many primitive things we cannot easily do with our computers. We should have building blocks like "send a message", "link to this file", and "query my data" on top of which we can construct our own tools.
Many tools are dumbed down to address a larger market, failing to be inspired to imagine a more competent society.
The most symbiotic tools are those where users don't just know how to use them, but deeply understand how they work.
Many tools are strategically designed as black boxes to avoid competition and create lock-in. In the worst case, users end up stuck using a tool that slows them down. And over time, these tools become technology traps and knowledge is lost until reinvented.
People should be able to own, not rent, all of the software and hardware necessary to operate their lives. Only then can people confidently accumulate the compounding benefits of their past efforts.
The cloud is unnecessary for most personal tools and only serves as leverage for monetization. And too often, these services are shutdown leaving their users empty-handed.
People should be empowered to solve their own problems and feel responsible for making the world a better place.
Every toolmaker faces a moral dilemma — will their tools be used for good or evil? While not absolved of this moral responsibility, toolmakers should empower individuals to make their own moral judgements respecting and encouraging each other's right to self-determination.
A rich text editor that feels like a code editor.
This application will help to organize thoughts and link together files in your local filesystem in a portable format that can easily be published to the web.
Meanwhile, he primary goal of this project is to lay the architectural foundations for a local-first application on top of which we can build the rest of our projects.
An embedded end-user database flexible enough for non-programmers to model, record, and query information.
Much of the information in our lives is inaccessible. Even for programmers, this information is prohibitively inconvenient to answer even the simplest questions. Through two-way sync, this database will become a robust way of interacting with the external digital world.
An off-the-shelf solution for peer-to-peer identity, encryption, discovery, and transport.
A simple chat application with configurable network ontologies and various solutions for device-to-device communication as well as group chat.
A platform for local-first software applications, using peer-to-peer communication to sync and collaborate, and an end-user database to serve as a medium for users to interact with the software world.
Cool Tools is founded and led by Chet Corcos.
Tanishq Kancharla is working on the HTML Editor.
In search of collaborators with experience with building databases or peer-to-peer networking and cryptography.
You can reach us via email at [email protected]