01 Why people are looking for a replacement
Rewind was the app that proved the idea: record everything on your Mac, then search it. It was good at that. Then its makers shifted their attention to Limitless, a wearable, and the Mac app stopped being the thing they were building. If you relied on it, you have been watching a product you liked slowly stop moving, and wondering what happens to a few hundred gigabytes of your own history when it finally does.
That is the situation Pixel Dust was built for. Same core promise — never lose what you saw — with two things Rewind never quite settled: what happens to your data, and how much of your disk you hand over.
02 Side by side
| Pixel Dust | Rewind | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your history lives | Your Mac only | Your Mac only |
| Still actively developed | Yes — shipping weekly | Wound down in favor of Limitless |
| What gets stored | Compressed stills, one per moment | Compressed video of everything |
| Typical disk use | A few GB per month | Tens of GB per month |
| Encrypted at rest | Opt-in, images and index both, key only you hold | Relied on FileVault |
| Search | Every word on screen, plus meaning-based search | Every word on screen, plus meaning-based search |
| Hides the macOS recording indicator | Never. If it's recording, your Mac says so | Never |
| Redaction | Apps, private windows, keywords, card and secret patterns | Apps and private windows |
| Audio and meetings | Not yet | Yes |
| Ask questions of your history | Yes, with your choice of model — or none | Yes, cloud model |
| Price | Free during beta | Subscription |
03 What Pixel Dust does differently
Stills, not video. Rewind recorded continuous video and compressed it hard. That is the right choice if you want to scrub through a meeting frame by frame; it is the wrong choice for the other 95% of what you do, which is find the thing you saw at 2:40 on Tuesday. Pixel Dust keeps one still per moment. Your history for a month fits in the space Rewind used in a week, and it opens instantly.
Encryption with a key you actually hold. Turn it on and both the images and the search index are encrypted with a key that exists in your Keychain and on a printed recovery sheet — nowhere else, including with us. We measured the cost before we shipped it: decrypting a capture takes 0.2 ms against 15 ms to decode the image afterward. You will not notice it. Here is how it works.
Redaction that understands shape. Beyond excluding apps and private windows, Pixel Dust scrambles keywords you name and recognizes card numbers and secret-shaped strings before they reach the index — with a checksum, so ordinary long numbers are left alone.
04 Where Rewind was ahead
Rewind recorded meeting audio and transcribed it. Pixel Dust does not, yet. If your use of Rewind was mostly meetings, that gap matters and we would rather say so than have you find out after signing up. Screen recall is the core; audio is on the roadmap behind it.
05 Switching
There is no importer for Rewind's archive, and we are not going to pretend one is easy: its format was never documented. What you can do is run both for a week. Pixel Dust starts capturing the moment you grant Screen Recording, and within a day you will know whether stills-plus-search covers what you used Rewind for.
Pixel Dust is free during the beta. Everything stays on your Mac.
Request beta access