Rewind

A macOS, local-first time tracker that watches your attention like a heart monitor. Rewind passively records which app and window is in front, counts your context switches, and replays the day as a seismograph/EKG-style trace so you can see where your focus fragmented.

What it tracks (and what it never does)

• Frontmost application (name, bundle id, PID) via NSWorkspace.
• Front window title via the window server / Accessibility API.
• Active browser tab title for known browsers via AppleScript.
• Context switches between frontmost processes, with a fragmentation rate (switches per minute/hour) over time.

Privacy: no screenshots, no keylogging, no network calls, no content capture — local metadata only, stored in a SQLite database on your machine.

Requirements

• macOS 13+ (Cocoa/Quartz APIs)
• Python 3.12+
• PySide6 (Qt for Python)

Setup

git clone https://github.com/CommunityPokeOrg/rewind.git
cd rewind
python3.12 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt     # or: pip install -e .

Run it:

python -m rewind        # or just `rewind` if installed with pip install -e .

macOS permissions

Rewind works with reduced data when permissions are missing — nothing breaks:

• Accessibility (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility): lets Rewind read front window titles when the window server redacts them.
• Automation (prompted on first use, per browser): lets AppleScript read the active tab title of Safari/Chrome/Arc/etc. Deny it and Rewind still records the browser's window title.

Where your data lives

~/Library/Application Support/Rewind/rewind.db — SQLite in WAL mode so the background poller (a QThread) and the UI can share it safely.

Schema: events (timestamp, app name, bundle id, window title, pid, duration) and switches (timestamp, from/to pid, from/to app).

Using it

• Rewind — the seismograph: a heartbeat trace of your day. Each spike is a context switch; taller, denser spikes = more fragmented attention. Navigate days with the arrows, or hit Replay day to sweep a playhead across the trace — each switch it crosses emits an expanding ripple.
• Timeline — every observation, chronologically.
• Statistics — top apps by dwell time and switches per hour.
• The sidebar's Pause tracking stops the poller; Resume picks it back up.

Project layout

rewind/
  app.py            # QApplication entry point
  ui.py             # main window, tabs, tracking toggle
  tracker.py        # NSWorkspace / Quartz / AppleScript sampler (macOS)
  workers.py        # QThread poller -> EventStore + Qt signals
  switches.py       # context-switch counter + fragmentation math (pure)
  db.py             # SQLite WAL schema + queries (pure)
  views/            # RewindView, TimelineView, StatsView
  widgets/          # SeismographWidget (custom-painted EKG trace)
tests/              # pytest suite for the pure modules

Tests

pip install pytest
pytest

(The suite covers the storage and fragmentation logic, which are Qt-free.)

License

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 CommunityPokeOrg. See LICENSE.