October 15, 2014

Gaming Marathon in Aid of Doernbecher Children’s Hospital

Filed under: General — Marcus Tettmar @ 11:54 am

On October 25th MJT Net employee Dorian Ellis is taking part in a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, a hospital local to Dorian which has treated children of friends of his.

When Dorian isn’t answering Macro Scheduler support tickets he’s often to be found playing on-line games, so this fundraiser combines his passion with a cause close to his heart.

Please check out his page and, if you can, make a small donation and let’s see if we can help Dorian reach his target of $1000. Thank you.

October 14, 2014

The Macro Scheduler MacroScript SDK in Python

Filed under: Automation, Scripting — Marcus Tettmar @ 2:19 pm

Did you know there was a Macro Scheduler SDK? It allows you to run Macro Scheduler code from right within your own apps. You can run and interact with MacroScript code within VB, C++, C#, Delphi, VBScript … or any other programming language which lets you use a COM object or Win native DLL.

It even works in Python. Here’s a small example which uses the screen image recognition functionality to find and click on the Windows Start button:

Another slightly more complex example which opens Notepad and types into it. It also demonstrates how you can call chunks of code at a time instead of all at once and set and get the value of script variables during execution. It also gets the result of the script set via MACRO_RESULT:

More information about the MacroScript SDK can be found here.

A number of customers have used the SDK to build macro-ing capabilities into their own products and/or create tighter integrations between their own software and automation routines using MacroScript.

If you’re interested in trialling a copy or getting pricing info drop us a line.

September 30, 2014

Testimonial – Radio Station Automation

Filed under: General, Success Stories — Marcus Tettmar @ 8:43 am

It’s always interesting to hear what our customers use Macro Scheduler for. So many use cases. Here’s one from Mark Croom:

For the convenience of listeners to the radio stations I work with, the program is doing some file handling tasks that put artist and title information onto our website and into radiotext on RBDS-capable radios, during programming that is supplied by satellite networks rather than through the local automation.

Works great and I can see the amazing flexibility of Macro Scheduler for other automation uses.

Mark Croom
Kinshipradio.org

September 22, 2014

Binary and Kids

Filed under: General — Marcus Tettmar @ 10:57 am

I taught my son Ben, who is 8, to count in binary last night.

It was fun. He struggles with math, but this seemed like a revelation for him. So simple, so powerful.

I realised he didn’t know what is inside a microchip – that a computer is just a box of switches. That when a sprite moves across the screen there are essentially just lots of little lights being switched on and off quickly. That 1s and 0s, ons and offs – two simple states – power our world, helped send men to the moon.

I sensed a Eureka moment for him. Almost wonder if in fact we’re teaching kids the wrong way around. Binary is so fundamental, so important, fun and easy. Teach kids to add and multiply in binary and I’m sure it will better prepare them for doing the same in decimal. If nothing else the fact that this has something to do with computers is probably a little incentive in getting them to pay attention.

I didn’t learn binary until half way through secondary school. I have no idea if/when schools teach it now.

Kids use tablets, smartphones, video games and computers all the time. Do they know what’s inside?

September 4, 2014

August 8, 2014

Detect Which Web Page IE Is On – Keep It Simple

Filed under: Automation, Scripting — Marcus Tettmar @ 9:43 am

Today we had two different support requests asking how to have a Macro Scheduler macro determine which page IE is on.

One person was asking about using Image Recognition for that. You could also use the IE functions to examine the HTML or look for the existence of a specific HTML element.

You could do one of those, sure, but I think that’s over complicating things.

My motto is “keep things simple”.

IE’s Window Title adopts the page title of the web page it is displaying. IE also shows the URL in the address bar. So why not just look at one of those. Like this:

//Two simple methods to see which page IE is at.

//Method One - Just look at the window title
IfWindowOpen>Bing - Internet Explorer
  //Bing is open - do this
Else
  IfWindowOpen>Google - Internet Explorer
     //Google is open - do that 
  Endif
Endif

//Method Two - Look at the Actual URL in the URL bar - I used the Wizard to get this code and then altered the window title to make it a substring match
UIGetValue>- Internet Explorer*,{"Address"},curVals,Positions,nHeight
Position>google.co.uk,curVals,1,pGoogle
If>pGoogle>0
  //must be at google
Else
  //must be somewhere else
  Position>bing.com,curVals,1,pBing
  If>pBing>0
    //must be at bing
  Endif
Endif

August 7, 2014

Macro Scheduler Referral Program

Filed under: Announcements — Marcus Tettmar @ 2:08 pm

Want to earn a little extra cash? If you are a registered Macro Scheduler user, you can now recommend Macro Scheduler to your friends, colleagues, customers – or anyone else – and we’ll give you 20% of every sale you generate.

You’ll find details in your account at http://customer.mjtnet.com/

July 24, 2014

Success Story: Automating Certificate Exports for a Bank

Filed under: General, Macro Recorder, Success Stories — Marcus Tettmar @ 6:32 pm

My recent newsletter with the screen-cast of the old Windows 3.1 Macro Recorder prompted the following email from long time customer, Ian. In his email he reminisces about how he originally found and used Macro Scheduler to solve a thorny problem for his employer which had previously stumped Microsoft. It’s a good story so I thought I’d share:

Hi Marcus,

I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for the upgrade to Macro Scheduler you sent me this afternoon. I’ve installed it and had a look at the sample scripts – I think I’m going to have fun with the image stuff J

Since it’s been so long, I think I am now able (if you are not bored silly) to explain how I used Macro Scheduler to save the bank a bucket of money…

I joined [large well known international banking group – name removed] as a ‘technical discovery analyst’ in the XP roll out project. No one ever explained exactly what my job was, but it turned out to be ‘sh!t catcher’ – anything that couldn’t be sorted elsewhere ended up on my desk and I had to find a fix (often in less than a day!).

The bank used a well known credit checking agency to do credit checks. In those days [well known credit checking agency] used Security Certificates in Internet Explorer to track billing data – each cert was a unique valuable entity, and we had two options; export them from the machines prior to switching them out, or reissue 10,000 certs! This is the task that Microsoft came in to do (they left about a month before I joined). The problem was that the certs are designed not to be exportable automatically, so that they cannot be programmatically stolen. And so they arrived on my desk.

Since I knew that I had to get a lot of people to run through a complex export procedure (much clicking and saving in the right place), I thought back to the Macro Recorder in Win 3.1. I knew that it wasn’t in NT or 2000 (which was in use at the time) and a quick Google brought me to your site. I popped downstairs to ask my boss for a hundred pounds for a proof of concept (!) and she gave me her bank credit card :-).

Once I had the software installed on my workstation I began to hack through the samples and the manual. By the end of the first day I had a pretty good idea of what I had to do, and at close of play on the next day I had successfully exported and reimported certificates. I was able to go back downstairs and say that I had a viable solution. Much Brownie Points for that conversation!

The export script had 19 versions by the end, and the import one had 11 (the users ran the export first, then the import on their new machine). I’ll attach the last version so you can wince at my cludgy code!

I also wrote a script to find out how much file data was on local machines since it was going to be dumped onto FP servers. That one’s an even bigger bowl of spaghetti code J

Anyway, I’m sure that’s enough for now! Thanks again and I’ll continue to spread the word about Macro Scheduler.

Take care, Ian

July 23, 2014

July 16, 2014

Happy Customers

Filed under: General — Marcus Tettmar @ 4:12 pm

Don’t do this often but wanted to share with you a couple of emails we received recently which really made our day:

“Absolutely brilliant! This is the best customer support by far that I have experienced!:)” Madars Opelts, Owner of Giraffe Visual

“This is one of the best support experiences I’ve ever had. Thank you!” Chris Wahl, President Wahl Network, LLC

It’s good to know we have helped, and it really means a lot to receive messages like this. Thanks for sharing Madars and Chris and thanks for the permission to repost.

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