Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Wikipedia lacks a “Macro Scheduler” page. It should be neutral (i.e. not written by me). Anyone can create one. Want to start it? Go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_Scheduler and get stuck in. Anyone can contribute.

So a day after celebrating our 10th anniversary I’m pleased to also congratulate Nagarsoft on their 1st year in business. Nagarsoft have achieved much in their first year, with the launch of their superbly crafted Direct Access:

Direct Access speeds up your personal computing experience by reducing time consuming, repetitive tasks through the use of abbreviations. Type an abbreviation in any application and Direct Access will detect it and perform the task you desire.

And by the way – Macro Scheduler customers can get 25% off Direct Access. You’ll see details when you log in to the registered download area.

Here’s wishing Andrea at Nagarsoft many more years in business. I look forward to being able to celebrate his company’s 10 year anniversary with our 20th!

In case you didn’t already know it, Macro Scheduler will be 10 years old this year. In fact, I had a quick look through our old sales records the other day and discovered that we sold the first ever copy of Macro Scheduler on 1st May 1997. So 1st May this year will be a special day. We’ve got a few things up our sleeves so keep posted for more news.

In the mean time Andy Brice, of PerfectTablePlan.com, suggested it might be fun to work out how much time Macro Scheduler has saved people in total since its launch in 1997. So we pulled some figures from our sales database, made a few conservative estimates, consulted our marketing people and ran a few number crunching macros and discovered that in total Macro Scheduler has saved approximately 27,000 years in lost productivity over the last 10 years.

In that time you could have built:

• 6875 Golden Gate Bridges, or
• 3928 Channel Tunnels, or
• 5500 Wembley Stadiums, or
• 1350 Great Pyramids of Giza.

[Although to be fair Herodotus estimated you’d need 100,000 workers to build the Giza Pyramids in 20 years]

Seriously. Sure, we had to make a few estimates but we’ve been conservative. This is based on our most complete year on year user-base figures and an assumption that on average each user saves 2 hours per working day. We’ve assumed a working day is 8 hours and a working year is 210 days. While some people may use the software on a more ad-hoc basis we know many run dedicated Macro Scheduler workstations running 24 hours a day. Anyway, we need something to work from, so we’ve chosen an average figure of 2 hours per day. But even if you halve that it’s still a pretty impressive outcome. And it could be more – that’s only working days and our user base figures most likely under-read due to various custom licensing arrangements and unlimited user licenses etc.

Hey, it’s just a bit of fun 🙂

Some dirty little spammer appears to have used valid mjtnet.com email addresses for the reply-to address of a recent spamming campaign. We’re getting dozens of mail failures for emails we didn’t send out, many of which are advertising a certain men’s pharmaceutical product. Nothing to do with us.

What can be done? Not a lot. We already have SPF records set up for our domain. SPF defines which mail servers are allowed to send mail for a specific domain. Unfortunately the vast majority of mail servers don’t bother to do SPF checks. Any that do will be rejecting those spam messages as they were sent from a different mail server to the one our domain permits to be used. But most won’t.

So I guess all we can do is wait for this to die down, filter out the mail failures and hope that this recent hijacking doesn’t get us unfairly blacklisted!

Nice to see Macro Scheduler listed on microsoft.com in The Vista Application Compatibility list:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/933305

Feels quite an achievement that we are one of the first 800 apps to be listed. On a global level that feels quite good and I believe demonstrates our commitment to future proofing our software and to staying several steps ahead of the competition. No other automation software is listed.

There’s a new beta version of Direct Access available from our friends at Nagarsoft. Regular readers will probably know how much I love this productivity tool. Direct Access lets you define keyboard abbreviations for commands, applications and folders etc. Once an abbreviation is set up you can type it wherever you are, whatever application is active. It’s great – I no longer wade through long lists of shortcuts in my Start menu, and I no longer have to switch from my open windows to the desktop and scan through desktop icons. All I do when I need to start something, or open my Documents folder is type in the abbreviation and hit F12. Doesn’t matter what window happens to be in front of me. It works like a dream. And it complements Macro Scheduler nicely too. I have a number of important macros that I run several times a day. With them set up to run from a Direct Access abbreviation I just type the macro name on my keyboard and it fires up. Really very handy.

Nagarsoft want your feedback on this new beta. Details here. This version is fully compatible with Microsoft Vista.

And don’t forget that Macro Scheduler customers can get 25% off Direct Access. Log into your account to get a coupon code and find out more.

Did you know it is now possible to purchase Macro Scheduler in Romania? Selling software in some Eastern European countries is difficult for two main reasons:

1) The local USD exchange rate means the regular USD price is much more than most can afford.
2) Credit card penetration is low.

These factors have lead to a high rate of piracy in places like Romania, where people either cannot afford, or simply don’t have the means to pay for software.

So we have teamed up with SoftMall.ro to sell Macro Scheduler in Romania. They are able to take local payment methods and Macro Scheduler is available from SoftMall.ro at 49 RON which equates to approximately $20 USD.