Rewind

FlashBack Rewind is a downloadable Windows based software program that runs in the system tray, silently recording the screen. When something happens on the screen that the user wants to save or review, they can ‘rewind’ their screen to see what just happened. In this way, FlashBack Rewind can help with hard to reproduce or occasional problems that cannot be solved via conventional screen sharing products.

Users can decide to share or save the entire screen recording, part of it, or just a screenshot. They can also add a selection of annotations or blur out parts of the screen that need to be kept private. Saved movies can be saved to a local file or uploaded directly to the FlashBack Connect movie-sharing service where they can be viewed in any browser by navigating to the URL provided.

Alternatively, FlashBack Rewind can send formal reports. These bundle up the recording with details of the recording PC and send all of this information to a specified recipient. When the report is sent, the recipient is notified by email about the location of the recording.

Whilst the user can define exactly what is sent in the report and where it is sent to, flexible customisation options are available via a set of ‘cloud settings’ that can be associated with a licence, allowing organisations to pre-configure their own set of default settings, which can simultaneously be updated at any time across any number of installations.

For greater administrative control, cloud settings can also be used to hide options in the user interface, preventing users from changing them. This streamlines the reporting process by reducing the number of steps that problem reporters need to complete, and it ensures that the reports are directed to exactly the right people, as defined by the organisation.

A simple API also allows organisations to integrate FlashBack Rewind into their own systems, allowing users to automatically submit reports with just a single click, or reduce submissions to a few clicks, depending on the pre-defined settings.

As a software company, we often see problems that we can’t easily duplicate. End users generally aren’t very good at reporting problems, since it’s not what they’re trained to do. So quite often we’ll get a bug report from them saying: “It crashed” (which, in a report is pretty useless). To pinpoint the problem, developers need to know what the user was actually doing at the time the program crashed, which version of the program is installed, which screen they were on, which button they pressed and so on.

To solve this, we looked for a simple solution. Since we already had recording tech available to us from our product division (flashbackrecorder), the answer was to develop our existing software into this standalone problem-reporting tool.

Because video files generally can become very big, FlashBack Rewind was designed to keep only the latest minutes, so that recordings are kept manageable and the impact on system performance is minimal. By default the last 2 minutes are retained but this can be adjusted as needed.