A private memory of your workday
Last updated 19 August 2026
What happened
On 19 December 2025, Rewind stopped capturing. Its parent company had been acquired two weeks earlier, and the screen-and-audio recording that people had built a working habit around was switched off. If you were relying on it, you did not do anything wrong. The product simply stopped being something anyone was obliged to keep running.
That is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the actual lesson and not a marketing line. Anything that needs a server needs somebody to keep paying for that server. Anything that needs a company needs that company to keep wanting to exist in its current form. Neither of those is a promise, however sincerely it was meant when it was made.
What Charmling does, starting with what it does not do
Charmling is not a replacement for what you had, and it would be dishonest to sell it as one. The differences are real and you should know all of them before you spend anything:
- It samples; it does not record. Roughly every four minutes, and only while you are actually at the Mac, it looks once at the frontmost window. It is not a continuous recording of your screen.
- You cannot scrub back through your day. There is no timeline, no video, no rewinding to 2:14pm to see what was on screen. That is not a feature that is coming later; it is a consequence of the design.
- It keeps text, never pictures. The image is read in memory and thrown away without ever being written to disk. No screenshot of yours is stored at any point, in any form.
- It does not listen. There is no audio capture of any kind.
- It starts switched off. Day Memory is off until you turn it on, and the longer-term diary is off until you separately choose how many days to keep.
What it does do: it writes one short line per capture into a plain text file on your own disk, and at the end of the day it can turn those lines into a recap of what you worked on, a paste-ready standup, or an honest timesheet. The summarising runs on your Mac, using Apple's on-device model. Anything the summary claims has to be traceable back to a captured line, or it is dropped rather than guessed at.
What that buys you
- No account. There is nothing to sign up for and no identity attached to anything.
- No upload. Nothing from your screen leaves the Mac. Not to us, not to a model provider, not to an analytics service. There is no network call carrying your data because there is nowhere for it to go.
- No subscription. $14.99, once. Not because we are being generous, but because nothing is running anywhere that costs money every month.
- Nothing that can be switched off from somewhere else. The app on your disk is the whole product. If this website disappeared tomorrow, the copy you own would keep working.
- An off switch that actually means it. You can turn Day Memory off entirely, erase the last hour, erase everything from one particular app, or delete the lot, from the app's own menu.
How to check, rather than how to trust
You should not take any of the above on faith, so here is the part you can verify yourself. Everything Charmling has written down lives in one file:
~/Library/Application Support/Charmling/day-memory.jsonl
It is plain text, one JSON object per line, created with owner-only permissions so no other account on the Mac can read it. Open it in any editor. If something is in there that you did not expect to be, that is a bug and we want to hear about it. Records older than 48 hours delete themselves.
The privacy page is the long version of this, written to be held against the app rather than to reassure you.
The part that is not about privacy at all
Charmling is, first, a lucky charm that hangs from your menu bar on a cord and swings when you move a window. There are eighty-eight of them, and each one is a real object from somewhere rather than a generic sprite: a maneki-neko, a daruma, a dala horse, a bonsai seed that flowers if you leave it alone long enough.
That is genuinely the point of the app. The memory is what it does while it hangs there. If you only want a small beautiful thing on your screen, you can leave every AI feature switched off forever and it will never ask you again.