Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Today is the first working day of 2012 here in the UK. It should be a positive day but the weather is doing its best to put people in a bad mood, with torrential rain and gale force winds across the country disrupting commuters and generally causing havoc.

The office Christmas decs have been taken down and Gearhead has removed his santa hat.

But we’re looking up! And looking forward to the 15th year of Macro Scheduler. Isn’t that amazing? Still pushing the boundaries, and still boosting productivity throughout the world.

So Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for being there!

Don’t forget that our Kindle Fire competition is still open to entries. We’re accepting entries until 15th January when voting will commence. Just tell us how Macro Scheduler helps (or would help) you and you could win the fantastic Amazon Kindle Fire Android Tablet (or vouchers of equivalent value).

Win a Kindle Fire (or $199 Amazon Vouchers)
Don’t forget about your chance to win an Amazon Kindle Fire running android, or vouchers of equivalent value. There are a few entries so far. There is still time to add yours. The closing date for submissions is 15th January when voting will commence. Enter here.

Get Macro Scheduler Lite Free with every Std, Pro or Enterprise Order
Until the end of December we’re giving away a copy of Macro Scheduler Lite with every new order of Macro Scheduler Std, Pro and Enterprise. Grab a copy for use at home, or for a friend or colleague. Offer ends 31st December.

Play Santa’s Gift Grab and Share Your Score
And finally, I hope you have been having fun with our little Christmas game. We certainly enjoyed making it. The highest score I’m aware of is 554 so far! Can you do better? Let us know how you did on our Facebook page.

We made a fun little Christmas game for you all:

Help Santa get the presents down the chimney, but watch out for the snowmen and coal which freeze the chimney or set the presents on fire. Of course true to form Macro Scheduler saves you time, so in the game if you catch an MJT Gearhead you get extra time!

Click on the image above or here to play. Don’t forget to share your score!

Enjoy, and Happy Christmas!

If you haven’t seen our December Newsletter you might not know that this December we’re giving away copies of Macro Scheduler Lite with all new purchases of Macro Scheduler Std, Pro and Enterprise.

If you don’t receive our newsletter you can sign up here. Every month we send an email with tips, update announcements, and, sometimes, special offers. Every subscriber also gets a 10% discount coupon and a free copy of QuickButtons. Plus you’ll be the first to get the news.

Don’t forget that this festive season there is also the chance to win an Amazon Kindle Fire.

We’re kicking off the festive season with a great Facebook contest.  The winner will receive a fantastic new Amazon Kindle Fire Android Tablet*.

All you have to do is tell us how you use, or intend to use, Macro Scheduler and how you benefit, or hope to benefit, from it.

Everyone can vote on the entries, so you can get your friends to vote for you or vote for your favourite story.

Entries close on 15th Jan and voting will run until 29th February when the winner will be announced.

To enter and view rules/instructions go here.

*If you are outside the USA and the Kindle Fire is not available where you live we will send you Amazon vouchers of equivalent value.

In the Macro Scheduler 13 releases notes we declared a known issue with the text capture functions when used to capture from a window or rectangular screen area if the underlying window belonged to a 64 bit process. And we promised to release a fix as soon as it was made available to us.

Well I’m pleased to say it is now here. v13.0.03 includes the fixed text capture libraries which address this issue.

Life is never simple though is it!? We’ve had to change the Text Capture Wizard very slightly. The new libraries don’t seem to like the way we used the mouse to drag the cross hairs to the target point for X,Y position capture. It seems that text capture can be affected by having a mouse button held down! I’ve reported this to the developers of the library component but rather than wait any longer we’ve made a simple change to the way the text capture wizard works. For point capture, instead of dragging the cursor to the point you want to capture from you now need to move the mouse while holding the Shift key down until you’ve captured the text you want (or move the mouse to the text you want, then hold Shift down until it shows in the wizard, then release Shift).

Workarounds seem to be the order of the day. Macro Scheduler 13 was built with the newest version of Delphi – Delphi XE2. Shortly after Macro Scheduler 13 was released some people noticed that if you open the help file from the main Macro Scheduler window, then leave help open, go into the Editor and then try and access the help or invoke help from the editor, the help window would become unresponsive.

This issue didn’t occur in v12 and we soon realised it is a bug introduced in Delphi XE2. We’ve reported it to Embarcadero and they are now aware of it. Apparently it is a regression to a bug that existed in an earlier version.

So the good news is that Embarcadero know about it. Trouble is they don’t release bug fixes quite as quickly as we do. So rather than wait we’ve completely re-written the way the help is displayed and handled so as not to use the Delphi libraries. So in this latest build the help system now works correctly!

V13.0.03 also fixes a few other small issues and you’ll find a complete list of changes here.

Registered Downloads/Upgrades | Evaluation Downloads | New License Sales

I am pleased to announce that Macro Scheduler 13 is now Shipping!

Here’s a quick round up of some of the exciting changes and new features in v13.

Easy to use Code Wizards

We’ve added new code wizards for simplifying image recognition, sending key strokes, performing mouse actions, and screen text capture. These code wizards are not just aimed at newcomers, but will also assist the most experienced developer in generating code more quickly. With these code wizards many tasks can be automated more quickly with less coding required.

To view these wizards in action please see the video demos listed below

• Text Capture Wizard
• Keyboard Wizard
• Send Keys to Object Wizard
• Mouse Action Wizard
• Image Recognition Wizard

Scripting Enhancements

Now you can locate UI objects by classname, get their screen position and send keystrokes directly into them even when they don’t have focus. The text capture functions have been improved so that more text can be retrieved from more applications including from 64 bit processes, plus a command to scan the screen for text and return its position. We’ve added a function to read data from an Excel file even if you don’t have Excel installed; more date and time functions; the ability to create your own error handler subroutines; faster – real-time – event handlers, more event handler types and the ability to create custom event handlers. V13 also has new variable/array management functions (and better handling of arrays in the debugger).

• Locate UI Objects
• Send Keystrokes to Objects Without Focus
• Faster Event Handlers
• More Event Types
• More Native Date/Time Functions
• Custom Error Handlers
• Improved Text Capture Functions with 64 Bit Support
• Find the position of text on the screen
• Read Excel data natively
• Improved Display of Arrays in Debugger
• More 64 bit support

In total there are 32 new script functions!

Run Statistics and ROI Calculator

A new tab appears in Macro Properties called “Stats”. This shows you things like when the macro was last run, how many times it has been executed, how many lines were executed, total elapsed run time, average time per line. It also provides a simple ROI calculator so that now you can easily show your boss how much time and money
your macro has saved you!

Hotkey Scope

Now you can specify whether a hot key should be active all the time or only if the macro’s group is active. This means hot keys can be shared between groups. Choose which macro should run by activating the appropriate group.

And that’s not all. For a more complete and detailed list of changes please see the version 13 Release Notes.

Downloads/Upgrades

Registered Downloads/Upgrades | Evaluation Downloads | New License Sales

Registered users with valid, up to date, maintenance can download version 13 from the registered user area here.