MacOS background screen recorder/reader for easy history search

? Cyte

? Work in progress – this is beta software, use with care

A background screen recorder for easy history search. If you choose to supply an OpenAI key, it can act as a knowledge base. Be aware that transcriptions will then be sent to OpenAI when you chat.

Uses

? Train-of-thought recovery

Autosave isn’t always an option, in those cases you can easily recover your train of thought, a screenshot to use as a stencil, or extracted copy from memories recorded.

? Search across applications

A lot of research involves collating information from multiple sources; internal tools like confluence, websites like wikipedia, pdf and doc files etc; When searching for something we don’t always remember the source (or it’s at the tip of your tongue)

Features

  • When no OpenAI key is supplied, Cyte is completely private, data is stored on disk only, no outside connections are made
  • Pause/Restart recording easily
  • Set applications that are not to be recorded (while taking keystrokes)
  • Chat your data; ask questions about work you’ve done

Development

Happy to accept PRs related to any of the following

Issues

  • App sandbox is disabled to allow file tracking; instead should request document permissions
  • Timeline slider not updating while video playing (timeJumped notification not sent until pause)
  • Build process fails on Github (Needs signing cert installed to sign embedded content?)

Refactor

  • Extract usage and search bars to own views from ContentView
  • Extract episode slider from EpisodeTimelineView into own view
  • Duplicate code in vision analysis handlers and get active interval (timeline views)

Feature requests

  • Keyboard navigation events: Return to open selected episode, escape to pop timeline view
  • Remove close matches from prompt context stuffer
  • Incremental index building on embedding store instead of full recompile at query time
    • Ideally, wrap FAISS for swift
  • Wrap tiktoken in Swift for more accurate context stuffing
  • Swift ReAct Agent
  • Filter incognito and safari private windows from capture
  • Easily copy code blocks in chat
  • Fallback to object recognition
  • Encryption e.g. Filevault?

Release Notes

Version 0.2 (beta)

  • While the application is running (but not while it is active), it records the users screen
  • Recordings are labelled according to the first window bought into focus for a given app
  • Save recordings as favorites and easily view them from the home screen
  • Show usage statistics by application for shown recordings
  • Select applications to blacklist which will prevent the application from being recorded
  • Search the full text content of screenshots by keywords
  • View any instant in time on a sequential timeline showing back to back recordings
  • View thumbnails for moments around the current instant in timeline view
  • Delete individual episodes through a context menu
  • Filter search results by preset time ranges
  • User supplied OpenAI key with GPT4 access allows user to ask questions in natural language
  • When GPT responds, the source information provided is displayed under the response
  • Use arrow keys to navigate recordings
  • While Cyte is minimised, pressing Command + Period will bring Cyte into focus
  • Pause/resume recording at any time using the Menu Bar icon
  • Show files that have been edited with click to reopen
  • Intel support with frames every 4 seconds, fast OCR path with no corrections and disabled file tracking
  • Right click to reveal recordings in finder
  • Right click on feed to batch delete memories
  • Right click on feed to export results as timelapse
  • Allow user-specified storage directory
  • Automatically delete memories older than user specified length

GitHub

View Github