Weekly Updates

[pgriffin]

All licensed users should download the latest version from the download site at least once each week. We will try to have updates, enhancements, fixes, etc... available by Monday mornings.

[pgriffin]

AppNavigator v1.1 is now available for registered users and for 30 day evaluations. This version allows users to easily create drag-and-drop mouse moves within AppNavigator processes. Also adde is the Capture New button, which may be used so that the user is no longer reqired to press the Hotkeys each time AppNavigator is to be invoked.

[pgriffin]

Licensed users should update to version 1.4.5 which has several features to enhance the speed of the image recognition.

[pgriffin]

My apologies for the delay between posts about AppNav.

Much has changed and if you are a licensed user, you should definitely update your installation. If you have looked at AppNavigator in the past, you should look again.

Some highlights include the ability to handle "Global Images". Global images are those unpredictable events that happen on your desktop, such as an incoming email alert, windows update alert, various application errors, etc...that simply are not par of any process, but will stop your AppNav process if not handled correctly. Now, AppNav can recognize these events and respond correctly and never miss a step in the currently running process.

AppNav no longer has the requirement of each image being unique on the screen in order to carry out a command. If the user selects to "use first found, if not unique", then AppNavigator will act on the the first occurrence of an image (usually from top left to bottom right) for instances were you need to work through each similar image on a screen or uniqueness simply doesn't matter to process.

Setting "Delay Before Capture" to a number of seconds will give the user time to set up the screen in the desired configuration. For example, many menus or controls on screens change appearance as soon as you invoke the capture tool because the capture tool causes a change in focus on the desktop. This problem is solved by telling AppNav to wait a few seconds from start up (when it takes focus) and the actual capture. So the Windows Startmenu and subsequent menus, as one example, may now be easily captured and acted on by AppNavigator.

Contact us for a download link if you do not own AppNavigator. Be sure to update from your download link if you are a licensed user.

[pgriffin]

We have now released version 2.4.6 All licensed users can (and should) be sure to download this latest release from your link.

Aside from the usual minor fixes in any release, this release has a couple of new options.

You may now turn on "Show History on failure" so that as soon as a process stops, AppNav will display the process step, all process settings for that step and the reason for failure.

Prior versions of AppNav could sometimes leave an "orphaned" instance of Excel running if the process was killed and it had an Excel file open. Now there is a setting to "Stop ALL Excel instances before processing"

Also, in prior versions, if the user selected to "Verify Unique Images", then only captured a very small image (or had intended to capture no image, but mistakenly moved the mouse) then AppNavigator would sometimes take a very long time (or stop responding) while trying to verify the image. That has been 'fixed' by requiring that all images be greater than 5 X 5 pixels before verifying unique images.

Please go to the contact page

http://www.mjtnet.com/contact.htm

and let us know if you would like to evaluate AppNavigator for your automation tasks.

Remember that AppNav can automate ANY UI! Java, "Green Screen", Web pages, Windows, Flash, etc....

[pgriffin]

The current version of AppNavigator is at 2.6.7 and, as always, all licensed users should update all installations from your install link.

Some of the latest changes are the addtion of a "LTrplClick" for those times when a double click just isn't enough.

Also added is the "WaitWhileExists" command. This command waits for any image to NOT be present instead of the usual AppNav behavior of waiting for an image to be found. Very useful when having to deal with very slow websites which might display a text or image to indicate there is a reload or search underway.

One the most useful new features is the ability to run any AppNav process directly from the AppNav UI and even starting and stopping your process on any image number you like. So if you are creating a process of 50+ images, for example, you can simply click RUN and then enter that you would like to start the process from image 38 and stop on image 48, instead of having to completely reset the screen and start over from image one! Really nice and quick now to create very large processes.

As always, if you would like to evaluate AppNavigator please go to www.mjtnet.com/contact.htm and fill out the required information.

[pgriffin]

We will continue to release minor version upgrades to AppNavigator, but the next major release will happen around the end of Q1 2009. In this version we will include an ability for the "end user" (non-programmer) to parse data to be sent to an AppNav process or data which is gathered by an AppNav process. Many customers now have to "read" pages from a website or application and need this functionality in order to create the necessary variables for subsequent processes.

Also, as AppNav customers build dozens of scripts which are critical to day-to-day operations, it is necessary that we add a "Process Monitor" which will be a central database of processes, how many times they have run, the ability to start/stop processes, check on processes that have reported a failure, and even "repair" a process based on the data available in the monitor.

AppNav is like implementing an "Electronic employee" and these new capabilities in the next major release will be a way for our users to always know exactly what that employee is actually doing or not doing!

[pgriffin]

To facilitate the ability to move AppNav processes from one machine to another, we have written an AppNav ImportExport tool which will move the data from one AppNav database to another. The user is prompted and can browse for each database location. This program does not copy all image files which are references in the database so image files and folders must be moved manually.

If you are a licensed user and need to move processes between licensed installs, please place a request on the support page under AppNavigator.