Rewind, an app that lets you discover everything you’ve seen, read or heard

Rewing records everything that happens on the screen thanks to an integrated search engine, a promising new app, and available only on Mac.

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending ten minutes searching your browsing history for a PDF’s URL only to remember (at best) that you received this document on WhatsApp, Message, Slack, or email.

On MacOS, Spotlight has long been used to help find its juniors, but unfortunately in some cases it can’t do anything. For example, a document is shared during a video conference meeting.

Keep everything to yourself

with the ambition of “To give men a perfect memory”of “Become the search engine for your life” Or let us find traces of everything we’ve seen, read, heard and said on your Mac that starts an attack on Rewind World.

The promise is beautiful and should be detailed.

Rewind is an application currently reserved for Macs, and specifically for Mac Apple Silicon. It harnesses all the power of the M1 and M2 chips – “We use every element of the SoC, so running Rewind doesn’t tax system resources like CPU or memory while logging. It’s almost incomprehensible.”, represents the site of the application at this point. Therefore, we imagine that the GPU and integrated neural network are requested. But we don’t know much.

In particular, at the moment, access to the program is limited and you have to go on a waiting list to access it – hopefully it won’t be long.

Save everything and… collapse

How does this ultimate memory work? Rewind “simply” records everything that happens on your Mac. Whether you’re on a video conference, reading an article online, or exchanging messages with a co-worker or friend, it’s all recorded locally…on video (and audio).

Two questions immediately arise. The first is the storage space such a file occupies. Rewind developers explain that they use this. Breathtaking summary “. By way of explanation, they presented a ratio of 3,750, “Without great loss of quality”. So, a 10.5 GB data file takes up only 2.8 MB on your hard drive. That leaves something to see coming. Rewind doesn’t specify how long the 10.5GB file is, but it says you can store years of backups, even with the smallest storage space on today’s Macs.

We have to say we are a little cautious. We are old enough to remember i2bp and its wonderful promises.

Privacy in mind

The second question that arises is a wardrobe: it’s privacy. First, as we said everything is stored locally on the Mac. Cloud intervention is not required for storage and various stages of processing recorded data.

“We use native macOS APIs and OCR to recognize and index all words that appear on screen.” The Rewind site explains. “That means we don’t integrate with tools like Gmail, Dropbox or Slack” This app continues the explanation by adding that the content is automatically saved when it is displayed on the screen. Obviously, Rewind refers to the site, and it is possible to pause the recording at any time.

In addition, a second drawer that affects our privacy allows us to choose which applications are registered or not. It’s also possible to request that your browsers private browsing mode be excluded from this backup… You can clean the log very easily, Rewind promises.

OCR and ASR, at your service

But once the display stream is saved, what happens? Along with on-screen handwriting recognition, Rewind uses a voice recognition function (automatic speech recognition) which is responsible for transcribing all your speech exchanges – finally you can easily prove it. This brilliant idea came at 16’45” during this marathon meeting…
In this case, there is very little doubt about the effectiveness of this solution, because it uses a technological platform available in another service provided by the same group and has been proven: the writer.

Once everything is coded, what happens? Via a simple keyboard shortcut (by default, shift cmd space, close enough to remember Spotlight), you can activate the rewind search tool. Type in a word and different events will be listed and categorized by application. After selecting the desired application, you will be faced with a video screenshot of the interface as soon as the word appears. You can go more precisely in a kind of chronological frieze. You can read the target text again or copy and paste it into a new document.

The promise of rewind is so beautiful that it raises doubts. It is necessary to wait to be selected and touch the program to form an opinion about the true strength of this application. However, before we see what the present or the future brings us, the second phase cannot be imagined – it is based on iCloud – and it will easily find the information viewed on any Apple device. or developed on macOS, iOS and iPadOS. After all, iPhones are a preferred viewing device, even for work.

Many more questions arise. But in the meantime, let’s understand that Rewind is still in its early stages. Also, its economic model is not clearly specified. Everything from one-time purchase to monthly/yearly subscription is possible.