Time tracking without screenshots: what you can still recall
A few days later, the document you edited last week or the page you opened is often only a vague impression. Recording the screen continuously and dragging the playhead looks like the least trouble. If you would rather not keep the whole picture, you need a different kind of record, so start by seeing how much a filename and a page path can recover, and which content was not in the record to begin with.
Screen recording can rewind, and the screen is not only work
Screen recording tools appeal mostly because they promise you can look backward. The version of a poster you dragged around in Figma that morning, and the spec you opened in Chrome that afternoon, are still there as pictures, so you do not have to guess the filename from memory. The same screen can also pop up a 1Password password, a private Slack chat with a colleague, or a customer quotation in a PDF. After continuous recording, these are no longer just something you glanced at in the moment. They are footage you can pause and replay. Rewind did this kind of continuous recording, and stopped recording after it was acquired. Anyone who still wants to look back at what they did on a given day needs another way to keep records.
Hina does not take screenshots or record the screen. The only system permission it requests is Accessibility (named Device Control and Data Access on macOS 27), used to identify the frontmost app and the window title. Window titles and page paths have to be turned on by you in privacy settings. When they are off, Trail shows only the app, the duration, and the input count. When they are on, document names and page locations are added.
Filenames, repository paths and page paths
What you can recover once they are on is mostly names and locations. Examples include Wednesday review.key on a Keynote window title, a source filename in a VS Code or Xcode title, the site and path in a Chrome or Safari address, and github.com followed by a username and a repository name, then a README or a discussion page. Open Trail the next day and those names are still there, so you can match which file you changed in the blog repository and which page you were looking at in the customer site repository.
URLs are not collected as they appear. At capture, the query parameters after the question mark and the anchor after the hash are removed, leaving only the protocol, domain, and path. Search parameters, login strings, and tracking parameters in the address bar, and the position that marks which section a document was scrolled to, do not enter the record. Window titles are different. If you have turned window titles on, the title of a Google results page may itself carry the words you searched, and those words stay with the title. A title is hidden only for private windows, password managers, browser titles that carry a URL query, fragment, or credentials, and titles matching the words you add under Hide titles containing these words, and a hidden title keeps only the app name.
Words on the page and words in a meeting
Words written on the page cannot be recovered. Hina does not read the page body. An outline you listed in Notion, lines you edited in a Google Doc, or a note you wrote and then deleted in Notes are not in the record unless they appeared in a window title or a path. Input count only shows that the keyboard or trackpad was used. It does not save the characters you pressed, so it cannot reconstruct a commit message or a sentence you changed in an email body.
What was said in a meeting is not in the record either. With Zoom or Google Meet open, Trail can record which meeting app was in front and how long that stretch lasted. It cannot record who explained the acceptance criteria or who promised another version on Friday. To write the conclusions after the meeting, you still go back to your own notes, the minutes document, or the invitation in the calendar.
Private windows, and when you need to replay
Private windows are recorded more narrowly. Safari’s private browsing and Chrome’s incognito window record only the app name, not that window’s title and not the URLs opened inside it. You switch to private browsing on purpose mostly because you do not want that browsing left in ordinary history, and Hina follows by recording only the name Safari or Chrome. The path of that page does not appear on Trail.
If you do need to replay the picture, for example to see where the button finally landed on that version of the Figma poster, or which draft the copy reached, a screen recording tool is a better fit. A window title can keep the filename. It cannot keep the versions the button moved through. The cost is that password fields, private chats, and customer quotations stay with those pictures. Whether they remain on the machine or sync to the cloud depends on how that tool does it.