I can’t help feeling as though the people owe me a royalty. Long ago—maybe 15 years ago—I wrote on my blog about a fantasy program I wished I had. It would quietly take a screenshot every time my screen changed. That way, I’d have a paper trail of everything I’d ever seen on the screen: every email, every web article, every chat session, every Word or PDF document, every photo. And I’d always be able to call it up again when my memory failed. “Oh man, where did I read that?” would be a thing of the past. To my astonishment, one of my readers wrote it.

It was an app that basically created a QuickTime movie file, where each frame was a snapshot of something you looked at. You could arrow-key your way through it and recall everything you’d seen or read. It was shareware, it was sort of unfinished, and you couldn’t actually search your little visual paper trail for a certain word.

David: That was a little more straightforward. Peter Lewis, the guy who was writing the “Consumer Tech” column, left The Times. He took a job elsewhere, so they were looking for somebody new. David Pogue bringing down the house as STC Summit keynote. When they put out feelers, my name came up a few times. It was a long process. Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition - Ebook written by David Pogue. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition.

It was cool, but it never went anywhere. Microsoft excel for mac. All I had to do was be a little patient.

Now, 15 years later, what that app should have been really exists—and it’s free. It’s called Atlas Recall. It’s in a beta-test stage for the Mac () only; a Windows () version is coming soon. There’s also an iPhone app, although it’s not what you’d expect; more on that in a moment. Meet Atlas Recall Once you install, it sits in the background, quietly indexing (keeping track of) everything you read or see. Every web page, every email, every chat session.

Then, the next time you have a “Where did I see that?” moment, you can search for words you remember. You can tap into Atlas Recall in any of three places: the Mac’s usual Spotlight search feature, the regular Google (, ) search (thanks to a plug-in extension for your web browser), or in the Recall program itself. You also get Recall results right in your web searches. More In the month I’ve been using Recall, my bacon has been saved no fewer than five times.

Five times I would have lost time hunting, trying to re-create searches, hunting through my browser’s History list, and so on. (To be clear: There’s a big difference between Recall and the History list that your browser automatically maintains. The History list stores only the names and addresses of the websites you’ve visited; Recall captures what was written on those pages. Big difference.) In the aftermath, for example, I read dozens of articles on the web. Later, I wanted to show my wife one I’d read about the reaction when Ronald Reagan was elected—but where?