Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
I am pleased to announce that Macro Scheduler maintenance update 14.2.06 is now available.
Links: Version History | Registered Downloads | Trial Downloads | New Licenses
You may already be familiar with the Macro Scheduler debugger and know how to set code breakpoints. But did you know you can set variable breakpoints too? With a variable breakpoint you can cause execution to pause when a specified variable becomes equal to a given value.
You will find the “Variable Breakpoints” option under the “Debug” menu in the code editor.
You can set one or more variables and values. Then at any point during execution when one of those conditions occurs the macro will pause and allow you to debug.
This can be very useful when you are not sure where an issue is occurring but you may know that a specific set of data causes a problem that you want to debug.
So it’s Black Friday. Sounds so gloomy. A day where many appear to go mad and gorge.
There’ll be no extra discounts from us today, but what we will do is donate 10% of today’s sales to The Woodland Trust and St Mungo’s charity for the homeless.
So if you buy or upgrade Macro Scheduler today, or renew your maintenance you’ll be planting some much needed trees and providing for people who really need stuff. 🙂
If you’re new to automating IE/websites with WebRecorder or the native Macro Scheduler IE functions you may be wondering how to determine which elements and attributes to use.
In this video I demonstrate how to use IE’s F12 key to invoke Developer Tools and use that to quickly find the elements we’re interested in and the attributes we need to use:
(You might want to click on the video toolbar to select a larger resolution size, view full screen or view on YouTube so that you can see the code).
Thanks again to Chris Henwood for designing another stunning livery. This time for this virtual Aussie V8 Dorian is driving in Forza Motorsport:
Dorian is racing this car twice a week. Good luck Dorian!
Macro Scheduler‘s ReadFile and ReadLn functions understand ANSI, UTF8 and Unicode files – as long as they have a valid BOM header. But a client recently needed to read in a file with a missing BOM. So we wrote a little bit of VBScript which reads the binary stream in, and then outputs a UTF8 encoded file.
Here’s the code:
VBSTART
Sub UTFConvert(filename)
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
txt = fso.OpenTextFile(filename, 1, False, -1).ReadAll
Set stream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
stream.Open
stream.Type = 2 'text
stream.Position = 0
stream.Charset = "utf-8"
stream.WriteText txt
stream.SaveToFile filename, 2
stream.Close
End Sub
VBEND
//Convert it to UTF8
VBRun>UTFConvert,%SCRIPT_DIR%\data.txt
//Now we can read it :-)
ReadFile>%SCRIPT_DIR%\data.txt,theFileData
I am pleased to announce that Macro Scheduler maintenance update 14.2.04 is now available.
Links: Version History | Registered Downloads | Trial Downloads | New Licenses
Yes, Macro Scheduler works great in Windows 10:
Allow me to tell you about a fun new technology called Chirp created by some good friends of ours.
Chirp is an exciting new technology that shares information between devices using sound and you can try it out for yourself.
Chirp works by using little more than your device’s speaker and microphone. Data is encoded into a sound which is then “chirped” over the speaker. Another device or devices within earshot will “hear” that sound and decode it.
The beauty of this is that it removes all technical obstacles to sharing data (no need for infrared, or setting up bluetooth etc) and makes it possible for the most basic devices (think Arduino boards, toys, TVs, games etc) to chirp without any special hardware. And it means that one device can very easily share data with multiple listening devices.
You can share URLs, notes, images and video between devices – and now from your desktop web browser. College lecturers and presenters find it very useful for sharing links to websites, slides and presentations to their delegates, without having to collect email addresses or use any special infrastructure.
You can download the free Chirp app from the Apple Store or Google Play to see it in action. It’s great fun! There’s also a Chrome Plugin which makes it a breeze to share links from your web browser to your phone/tablet.
And if you want to make your own apps chirp there’s an SDK you can get your hands on too. I had some fun not long back making a Lego EV3 Robot chirp. Why not!? Anyone for a Macro Scheduler -> Chirp Interface?
And if you like what you see why not get in on the action – Team Chirp are currently crowd funding to raise money to take Chirp to the next level and are exploring commercial opportunities – so you can even make a little investment.
Did you know that since Macro Scheduler 14.2 the Macro Recorder can store snapshots of windows and objects that you click on as you are recording?
This feature makes it easier to work out which bit of code does what as you can see the screenshots inside the script:
Note the thumbnail images in the script. To view a full sized version – as in the example above – double click on a thumbnail.
This feature is on by default but can be switched off before you record a macro by toggling the “Take Window Snapshot Images” option on the macro recorder settings dialog.