October 11, 2006

“See” the Screen with Image Recognition

Filed under: General — Marcus Tettmar @ 2:52 pm

I love the Image Recognition functions in Macro Scheduler 9.0. They make it easy to automate anything. I made a quick and dirty demo showing how to use the Image Recognition functions in v9 to automate a remote Citrix session. You can watch the demo here.

Update: The video was produced way back in v9 before a number of improvements. With the current version it is no longer necessary to get the screen resolution and capture the screen as you can simply specify SCREEN in the haystack parameter of the FindImagePos command and it will automatically scan the screen. This cuts down the amount of coding while also improving performance. Since v12 it has also been possible to specify the number of pixels to match or whether to do an exhaustive search.

But imagine being able to build an automation script that will automate anything, regardless of the GUI technology or operating system – Web Sites, Java Applications, Desktop Applications, whatever – without writing a line of code. Just tell the computer what to click on by highlighting a screen object, what to do when it finds the object, what to do if it can’t be found, what objects to wait for etc. Wouldn’t that be cool? Well it’s not just a fantasy. We’re doing that right now and some customers are already using it. With this tool you just “teach” your computer what to do. Automation Scripts that took days, can now take minutes. I’m itching to show you, so watch out for a demo soon. If you can’t wait and if you think your company could benefit from something like that, give us a shout.