It’s free for now, and this basic version will always be free. Honestly, even if all Atlas Recall could do was instantly find text in any web page, email, chat, or PDF you’ve ever seen, it would be worth installing. Still, this business about storing the images of your deepest, most personal information on somebody else’s servers will be a deal-killer for lots of people. You can block stuff from Recall’s prying eyes. Since you can open them right on the phone, it’s still occasionally useful. From the phone, you can search “everything” you’ve seen on your Mac. Instead, it’s a viewer into your Mac’s photographic memory. It’s not an iPhone version of the Mac app, though-it doesn’t add a photographic memory to your phone. It’s blind to what’s in page-layout files like Adobe ( ADBE) InDesign. It can’t find text in Tweetbot, my Twitter ( TWTR) program. Recall can’t find text in the Mac’s Notes app, Calendar, or Stickies. It can’t seek inside of them, which is very odd-the Mac’s built-in Spotlight command can do that! It’s even worse at things like Microsoft Office documents, which it can find only by their titles. It does the same thing if you search for an Evernote page, or for an email that no longer exists. It does a great job of finding words you’ve had in chats-but when you click Open, it opens up a screenshot of the relevant screenful of chat, rather than opening the chat program and scrolling to the right place. Unfortunately, Recall isn’t as impressive at other kinds of documents. It can call them up again instantaneously, and when you click Open, you’re returned to the actual web page (in your browser) or email (in your mail program). Recall is rather spectacular when it comes to finding web pages you’ve seen, email you’ve read, PDF documents you’ve opened, and people you’ve opened in Contacts. That’s what the website says, but it’s not even remotely true. “What types of content does Recall remember?Īnything you see on your screen, Recall remembers.” I did a search for “Siri,” and boom: Atlas found it in Messages. I couldn’t remember the wording, and I couldn’t remember if our exchange had been by email, Messages, or Facebook Messenger. The next day, I wanted to find a discussion I’d had with my wife about some hilarious answer that Siri had provided. Later, I wanted to show my wife one I’d read about the reaction when Ronald Reagan was elected-but where? I’d probably been on 30 sites over three days! Boom: Atlas found it, front and center (you can see that in my video above). In the aftermath of the election, for example, I read dozens of articles on the web. The History list stores only the names and addresses of the websites you’ve visited Recall captures what was written on those pages. (To be clear: There’s a big difference between Recall and the History list that your browser automatically maintains. Five times I would have lost time hunting, trying to re-create searches, hunting through my browser’s History list, and so on. In the month I’ve been using Recall, my bacon has been saved no fewer than five times. You also get Recall results right in your web searches. You can tap into Atlas Recall in any of three places: the Mac’s usual Spotlight search feature, the regular Google ( GOOG, GOOGL) search (thanks to a plug-in extension for your web browser), or in the Recall program itself. Then, the next time you have a “Where did I see that?” moment, you can search for words you remember. Every web page, every email, every chat session. Once you install Atlas Recall, it sits in the background, quietly indexing (keeping track of) everything you read or see. There’s also an iPhone app, although it’s not what you’d expect more on that in a moment. It’s in a beta-test stage for the Mac ( AAPL) only a Windows ( MSFT) version is coming soon. Now, 15 years later, what that app should have been really exists-and it’s free. It was cool, but it never went anywhere.Īll I had to do was be a little patient. It was shareware, it was sort of unfinished, and you couldn’t actually search your little visual paper trail for a certain word. You could arrow-key your way through it and recall everything you’d seen or read. It was an app that basically created a QuickTime movie file, where each frame was a snapshot of something you looked at. To my astonishment, one of my readers wrote it.
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