I am so excited about the new features in Macro Scheduler 10 – coming January. I’m currently running a pre beta copy now.
One of the most amazing improvements is the optimisation of the FindImagePos function. We’ve made a 30-50 fold speed increase. It is now almost instantaneous. Average time to locate a bitmap at the bottom right of a 1600×1200 24 bit screen on Vista running aero glass: 0.2 seconds.
We’ve also optimized GetRectCheckSum which always used to be very slow.
But my favourite additions are the Text Capture commands which use low level hooks to retrieve practically any text. These commands can get text out of MS Word, MS Excel, Internet Explorer, Firefox. Pretty much anything. We’ve added commands to get the text at a specified screen position, get the text in a rectangular area of the screen, from a window and for waiting for text to appear on the screen.
The old GetWindowText and GetControlText functions work by accessing the published text properties of controls – they basically “ask” the objects for their text. But not all controls publish the text associated with them. Some controls, like labels, aren’t windowed controls at all, so there’s no way to just connect to them and ask for their text. But using some really clever technology we’ve now got the ability to retrieve pretty much any text that is written to the screen. These commands will make it much easier to scrape information from stubborn applications and websites. I can also see these commands making software testing easier, as it is now easier to verify data on a UI.
There’s heaps of other stuff too – the debugger now supports multiple breakpoints and you can step and then run from current position, then step from breakpoint etc. And finally a Search Bar to search through your long list of macros.
But that’s all I’m giving away for now ….
