How Charmling remembers your workday

Charmling can remember what you worked on and where you've been. This page is how that works in plain words, what it refuses to look at, and how it compares to what Apple and ChatGPT now do.

How it reads your screen

This is the part people find surprising.

Every Mac app has to be able to read itself out loud. Apple built that in years ago so that people who can't see the screen can still use a computer. The app hands over its text, and the Mac speaks it.

Charmling listens to that. It doesn't photograph your screen and squint at the picture.

Two things come out of that. The text is exact, because the app handed it over. And there's no photograph, which means for most apps Charmling never asks to record your screen at all.

A few apps hand over nothing. Games, videos, some PDF readers. They just paint pixels, and for those Charmling falls back to looking at the screen the old way. That picture is used and dropped in the same breath. It is never saved anywhere.

It looks once every few minutes, at the window in front of you, and only while you're actually sitting there.

A receipt, not a diary

Understand this bit before you buy anything, because it's the whole design.

Charmling keeps two different things, and they last for different lengths of time.

The words on your screen last two days. They're what the recap, the standup and the timesheet are built from. After 48 hours they delete themselves and nothing brings them back.

Where you were lasts as long as you like. Which app, what the window called itself, the link, when you got there, how long you stayed, and one line about it. Charmling calls this the trail.

Think of the difference between a receipt and a diary. A receipt says you were at the café for an hour on Tuesday. A diary says what you talked about while you were there. Charmling keeps the receipt and bins the diary.

So you can ask “what was that camera site I was reading last month?” and get the page back with a link to it. You can't ask what the page said. A year of receipts is useful and tells very little about you. A year of diaries is something nobody should be holding.

The receipts are locked. They're scrambled on disk with a key that only exists on this Mac and can't travel to another one, not even through a backup. Nothing reads them without it. And when you pick Forget the Whole Trail, Charmling deletes the receipts and throws the key away, so even a stray copy somewhere is unreadable noise.

What it won't look at

All of this happens before a single word is saved.

• What you type. Charmling never watches your keyboard. There's no setting for it because there's no code for it. It only ever sees text an app has finished and put on the screen. Something you typed and deleted, a password in a box that wasn't marked as one, a search you thought better of: it never saw any of it.
• Anything with a password box on screen. If there's a password field anywhere on the window, Charmling records nothing from it and doesn't take a fallback picture either.
• Money and health. Your bank, your payments, your tax, your insurance, your doctor's portal, the pharmacy, therapy. All refused.
• Password apps. 1Password, Bitwarden, Keychain Access and the rest. Not what's in them, not the window title, not even a note that you had one open.
• Private browsing. Safari and Firefox private windows are skipped. One honest gap: Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc don't tell other programs when a window is incognito, so Charmling can't tell either. For those, use the list below or the Private Mode switch.
• Your email and your chats. Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, in an app or in a browser tab. Charmling notes that you were in your inbox. It never reads a message. Other people wrote those and they never agreed to anything.
• Whatever else you say. There's a list in the menu where you name apps Charmling must leave alone. It obeys it.
• Sound. It has never recorded audio and it never will.
• Everything, until you say so. Memory is switched off when you install the app.

Apple, ChatGPT and Charmling

Both of the big ones now do something in this area. Here's the comparison written straight, including the places Charmling loses.

Taken from what each one says about itself. If any of it has gone out of date, tell me and I'll fix it.

Where Apple wins, plainly. If the thing you're trying to remember was said to you in Messages or Mail, ask Siri. Apple has your actual messages and Charmling won't read them. Charmling answers the other question, the one about your own work, in the apps nobody built a clever integration for.

What you get out of it

• No account. Nothing to sign up for. Nothing has your name on it.
• Nothing gets uploaded. Not to me, not to an AI company, not to an analytics service. There's no network call carrying your screen because there's nowhere for it to go.
• Nothing to download for it to work. The part that understands what you meant, rather than only the words you typed, is already inside macOS. Charmling never fetches a model.
• No subscription. $14.99, once. Not generosity. There's just nothing running anywhere that costs money every month.
• Nobody can switch it off but you. The app on your disk is the whole product. If this website vanished tomorrow, your copy would carry on working.
• A real off switch. Turn memory off, erase the last hour, erase everything from one app, or delete the lot. All from the app's own menu, one click each.

Two things it will never do

• You can't scroll back through your day. No timeline, no video, no rewinding to 2:14pm to see your screen. That isn't coming later. It's a decision.
• It doesn't record. A glance every few minutes at one window isn't a recording, and it was never meant to turn into one.

Don't take my word for it

None of the above should be taken on faith, so here's the part you can check yourself. The two-day record is a plain text file, one line at a time, set up so no other account on your Mac can open it:

~/Library/Application Support/Charmling/day-memory.jsonl

Open it in any text editor and read every word. If there's something in there you didn't expect, that's a bug and I want to hear about it. Lines older than 48 hours delete themselves.

The trail sits next to it and is locked, so you read that one through the app instead. Show the Trail in the menu prints everything it's holding. Nothing is kept back from that list.

The privacy page is the long version, written to be held against the app rather than to make you feel better.

Why it's built this way

Charmling has no server, no account and no monthly fee. There is nothing to keep running, and therefore nothing anyone can stop running. The copy on your disk is the whole thing.

That matters more than it sounds. Software that needs a server needs somebody to keep paying for that server. Software that needs a company needs that company to stay the same shape. Neither is a promise anyone can keep, however much they mean it at the time. Apps that remembered people's days have been switched off before, and the people relying on them had done nothing wrong.

The part that is not about privacy at all

Before any of this, Charmling is a lucky charm that hangs from your menu bar on a cord and swings when you move a window. There are ninety-nine of them, and each one is a real object from somewhere: a maneki-neko, a daruma, a dala horse, a bonsai seed that flowers if you leave it alone long enough.

That's the point of the app. The memory is what it does while it hangs there. If all you want is a small beautiful thing on your screen, you can leave every AI feature switched off forever and it will never ask you again.

See the charms, and what it costs