Author of rem here.

Come join in on development!

It's MIT Licensed.

I also kicked off a cross-platform version in rust https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/xrem which is earlier in development and could use even more help.

Awesome! But how about private browser windows?

I'm guessing you're asking if there's a way to prevent recording private windows?

It's possible to not record specific window IDs (at the code level) - so you'd need to be able to detect whether the window is "private". I am not familiar with such a flag.

Alternatively you might be able to just have a lookup or regex of all the most popular private browsing / applications...

Or let a user specify a pattern to look for and skip.

But at the same time, it's your private data and it's not going anywhere. There's no telemetry or network access of any kind.

Anyway- doesn't exist as a feature today. Maybe someone (you?) will build it!

Is there anyone here that has used it for an extended period of time? Would be interested to see if it’s actually helpful.

I can't speak for the mentioned app (rem), but I built my own app with a similar feature set called ScreenMemory (https://screenmemory.app). Which I have obviously used for an extended period of time (coming up on 7 months I believe).

My main and daily use case it to look back at the previous day - this is helpful for standups, retros, and so on. I skim through my days (sometimes weeks) to pick up on what I was working on - it's incredible how much "untracked" work is performed that you pick up on. Sometimes I forget who exactly I talked to about something, but just knowing the rough date I can usually find something to jog my memory.

Obviously I am biased, but still!

I used to use Google Desktop back when it existed for its viewed web page search feature mostly. It was pretty handy.

Google Desktop was the first thing I thought of when I saw the link. One difference with Desktop though is that nowadays people are doing stuff on more than one device. Synching the data somehow or other would presumably involve the sort of cloud services that this developer is avoiding for privacy reasons.

I build a lot of stuff and forget why I did things the way I did.

You can do things like find the point in history where you fixed a bug and go watch yourself debug and put in the fix.

Pretty wild. It makes a lot more sense once you experience getting the value.

Personally I hope Apple adds the feature natively to the OS at some point. They're plenty experienced to build it themselves over there, but maybe having a reference implementation will encourage them to give it a shot.

I spent ages looking for something like this for Mac before giving up and writing a script that takes screenshots every 10 seconds and another script to compile that up into video using ffmpeg!

I'd love to contribute but I know nothing about Swift, mine was all in bash scripts with launchd to run them.

also http://rewind.ai which is a company doing the same thing

Why is it "AI" though.

Seems it's using LLMs (GPT4 in this case) to transcribe and summarise documents and draft notes, emails, etc.