Other Suites

Desk Suite: the work around the office applications

The smaller jobs that sit beside a document or a spreadsheet and are never quite worth a program of their own. MERGE writes one letter per row of a list; CALC is a calculator tape you can scroll back through and correct; ROSTER builds a rota and shows the rules it breaks; LABELS prints a sheet of labels measured in millimetres, and ENVELOPE prints an address where the window is. There are money tools that reconcile, BASE, a small database with typed columns and saved views, Canvas, an infinite whiteboard, flashcards, a CV builder, and tools for people who write code: regular expressions, cron, subnets and fonts.

For anybody who runs a small office, a household or a club, and for whoever in a team ends up doing the rota.

Record Suite: statements, chronologies, ledgers and evidence

For work that has to stand up later, in front of a court, a tribunal, an auditor or a regulator. PROOF fingerprints a set of files so anyone can show later they have not changed; EXHIBIT binds exhibits into one PDF with Bates numbers; TIMELINE builds a chronology with its sources; DIARY works out a deadline and shows the counting; DSAR and BREACH run the clock on a subject access request and a data breach. There are registers for holds, consent and retention, money tools that add up for an accountant, and, for people first on a scene, a nine-liner, a triage board and a cordon log.

For solicitors and paralegals, investigators, HR and data protection officers, and anyone keeping a record of a dispute.

Standard Suite: the rule somebody wrote down, worked exactly

Arithmetic for work on site and on the road. Most of these answer to a published limit, table or clause, name it, and say how much room is left: FALL, whether there is room below a harness to be caught; SLING, what each leg of a lift really carries; TACHO, drivers’ hours to the minute; ZS, whether a circuit will disconnect in time; NOISE and VIBRATION, a day’s exposure. The rest work out how much to order and how to cut it: concrete, paint, and which bar each piece comes off.

For site managers, riggers, electricians, transport planners and the health and safety adviser who checks their sums.

Trace Suite: what a device, a network or a file left behind

Tools for reading traces and saying honestly what they show. BEACON finds what is calling home on a timer in a network log; LOGON, which account went somewhere new; MFT and TIMESTOMP catch files whose dates were rewritten; SHORTCUT reads a Windows .lnk file and RECYCLE the Recycle Bin; YARA and MITRE are for writing detections and mapping behaviour to ATT&CK; SHADOW dates a photograph from its shadows.

For incident responders, digital forensics examiners and investigators, who often cannot send what they are looking at to anybody else’s server.

What is free, and what is Pro

Every tool in these four suites opens with no account and checks a file for free. Saving the result is part of OBSCURA Pro, US$9 a month or US$79 a year, with 7 days free, or US$2 to save from one tool for a day. The Workspace is free throughout. The seventeen applications (Keep, the Sovereign Suite, the Engineering Suite, the Photo Editor, PDF Studio, Case, Umbra, Books, Roots, Research, Practice, Write, Authorship, Sound, Vector, Erase and the Converter) are Pro, or US$4 a month for any one of them on its own.