Ever since Mac OS X Tiger came out in April 2005 – yes, it has! – Apple’s operating system benefits from the presence of Spotlight, an integrated search engine that in its early days was reminiscent of the excellent Quicksilver. Over time, Spotlight has grown, caught Siri’s attention, learned to search the web, perform some basic calculations and conversions, while continuing to delete files scattered around the hard drive to always find everything. Find everything? Not quite.
Who sent you this document on the symbolism of parietal art? Was it via email? Whatsapp? posts? Impossible to remember. Same thing: What did your colleague say during the endless video conference where you forgot your notes at home? You remember one keyword, but more of the rest… In all of these cases, Spotlight can do little or nothing. Luckily, for those little omissions that drive you insane, there’s Rewind.ai, an ingenious application that works in the background, lurking like a big cat sleeping with its eyes open in a corner of your hard drive. .
Unlimited Storage…
The promise is simple: “What if you had a perfect memory? “. Simple, the application is also easy to use. It is located in the menu bar and from there you decide what it records. By default, it “only” remembers what is happening on the screen. Note that only every two Seconds what is displayed is captured as images.When using multiple screens, the application “only” records the one on which the cursor is active – an important point to keep in mind when following a video conference and at the same time Taking notes in a text document…
But this screen capture is just the beginning. Because Rewind ensures that all text that appears in a Finder window, in a browser, in email or in a Word document is recognized as such and can therefore be indexed for later searching. This is ideal for finding a document hidden in an email and poorly stored in a subdirectory’s dungeons.
But the Rewind teams didn’t stop there. The program now allows you to record the microphone – meaning what you say – and the speakers – meaning what you hear. And again, what is said is converted to text so that it can be easily searched afterwards!
Invoking Rewind and its search interface is very simple: just click on its icon in the menu bar or use a keyboard shortcut similar to that invoking Spotlight (Shift Cmd Space). From then on there is a small text entry window in the middle of the screen where you can type your request. Ergonomically, it is minimalist and perfect. To save some time, you can decide with a mouse click whether you want to search in apps, in audio transcriptions or in very specific moments that you have marked with a star, spontaneously or a posteriori in to find them faster.
01net.com – Easily select which recordings are active from the menu bar. 
01net.com – It is possible to customize the keyboard shortcuts for rewind activation.
Go back in time…
When you’ve entered the keywords you want, the Rewind interface takes up the entire screen. Thumbnails of the screenshots containing the searched words are displayed in several lines. At the very bottom of the screen, a timeline spans the full width of your monitor. It is very easy to scroll in it to travel back in time. This timeline is divided into color zones that correspond to the apps that are open and active throughout the day. We quickly find its habits: blue for the Finder windows, yellow for Chrome’s, etc.
The date and time of the recorded event is also displayed in a small bubble so you can set the time you want. In our opinion, it would be more relevant to be able to define a search time range via the input field, but given the large changes – systematic for the better – that have been made since we first started using Rewind, it’s entirely possible that this will be added quickly. .
What happens after Rewind finds what you were looking for? Well, things have changed here over the past few months as well. If you are looking for a snippet of an article online, you can click the URL in the screenshot and reopen this page. This “deep link” system works with Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Linear, Slack, Figma, and Notion. On the other hand, if it is a Word document or an email, unfortunately it is not possible to try to open it, but you can re-read the passage in question and of course consult its name… to do it to find it thanks to Spotlight. Yes, the Apple tool and Rewind can make a good pair!
Video conference audio, like you’re there… again
It gets really interesting when you want to find a specific passage in a long video conference (or any YouTube video). Assuming you’ve selected the correct language (or let the settings take care of that for you), Rewind should not only find the exact audio passage in the transcript and display a screenshot of the video stream, but you can also listen to it by engaging in a built-in audio player.
Better still, ChatGPT has been integrated into the application for a few weeks and you can request a written summary of this intervention. Handy, right? Be careful though, as convincing as the result in English is, the result in French is less commendable. You can also try other languages for text and audio transcription, such as German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.
With 01net.com – Rewind you can listen to a conference again and get a more or less accurate transcription depending on the language.
Privacy: Everything is local
And that very little detail of the language is a perfect transition to an important point that we have not mentioned: respect for your privacy. Because when you have everything you do recorded in an application, the question naturally arises as to what barriers you might be trying to erect.
Of course, and above all, it is always possible to interrupt the general recording. Likewise, you can adjust the recording of the microphone and speakers when certain applications are opened.
And for the slightly choosier, Rewind stops recording your private browsing activity with any browser. The only problem: for this restriction to work, your entire system must be configured in English. If you leave macOS in French, Rewind makes no difference in private and public browsing…
Fortunately, it is possible to see which applications are registered and which are excluded, through an interface that lists the applications installed on your computer. You can also easily exclude others by adding them. This is especially useful when you’re working on personal documents that you don’t want anyone to see.
However, “everyone” must have access to your Mac because everything is stored locally. That’s what the app strives for anyway, and our attempts to get it to work offline went without a hitch. Except, of course, when it needed updating, which is common and almost always comes with welcome new features.
01net.com – Rewind’s search interface is very clean and well thought out.
However, this local storage has at least three drawbacks, and some of its issues are being identified by Rewind developers working on a fix.
The first, obviously, is that you cannot sync your history from one Mac to another via the cloud.
Secondly, you can say goodbye to your Rewind archive if for some reason your storage fails or needs to be reset. Therefore, this app does not replace either Time Machine or a good old file backup in the cloud – especially since it is currently not possible to specify the storage location of the Rewind archive.
Finally, the third “negative” point: it is obvious that your digital memory will take up space. Rewind says it takes around 14GB to store all of your activity each month. In fact, after two months of daily use, we reached almost 23 GB. Two things about this: First, it seems to confirm that Rewind’s compression algorithms are very good, even if it’s not a video stream that’s being recorded. While that’s a nice amount of storage, of course, Rewind’s appetite on a decently sized SSD shouldn’t be a problem.
As an aside, we haven’t used it on a Mac with a hard drive (these are very rare now), but slow storage media may not be very compatible with this background recording.
Of course, to solve the issue of growing occupied space, you can define a duration of information storage. The application offers several stages: one week, one month, three months, six months, one year, forever. It is therefore up to you to find the balance between the usual duration of the projects you are working on and your need to free up space. Of course, it is very easy to delete the entire archive – and also a specific moment. In this case, this is done through the search interface, selecting and deleting the memory segment is done using the back key on the keyboard.
Honestly, we’d like a little more flexibility when it comes to cleaning up rewinds. To be able to delete the archives from four weeks ago between one day and the other because the file that has been occupying us is returned, for example to free up space while keeping older archives. Rewind does not currently offer this option. Again, we wouldn’t be surprised if the developers offered a fix for this minor bug.
01net.com – It is possible to disable the recording and Rewind will periodically remind you to restart it just in case. It is also possible to exclude applications from Rewind’s memory overhead.
The question of costs… and interest
Now the question arises as to the quality/price or interest/price ratio. No suspense here either, your “perfect memory” is quite seductive. Rewind is free to install and you don’t need to enter any bank details. There is a possibility that the application will record your activities indefinitely. In fact, the only fixed limitation is the number of rewinds when you ask him to find something. The first fifty are free, and then you have to take out a monthly subscription: $10 monthly for 10 rewinds per month and $30 per month for additional unlimited rewinds.
Which one should I choose? During our almost three-month test period, we achieved about forty “rewinds”. So we didn’t have to go to the checkout (yet).
And that detail might say more than you might think. That is, despite intensive use of our Mac, which we use every day both to follow online briefings or interviews, as well as to write, read, search for information online, send emails, etc. We didn’t necessarily have to call Rewind a lot? This is undoubtedly related to our habits and organization, but it should be kept in mind.
Anyhow, the ability to start an unlimited time trial is a good way to see if Rewind is saving your day – it’s helped us a few times, or at least made our job easier – or is leaving something forgotten and stretched out Safety net waiting for the day you will need it. Honestly, it’s hard to fault an offer that promises you a “perfect memory” for free!