Monday, August 4. 2008Dull tasks? Automate them!Isn't it great that you can script anything in an open source OS such as Linux/Ubuntu? Dcop rules. A good reason not to use windows (for me that is). If you still bound to win32, here's a great band-aid for this lack of 'scriptability': Imagine the perfect piece of software to automate all your dull, repetitive tasks. It exists, and I think that the best one is this:Â autohotkey. Not because I evaluated all of them, but just because it's (more or less) perfect.
My significant other was typing over long questionnaires from a printed .csv file into a windows application. Now that's dull... The questionnaires were about 500 yes/no questions. This was about 20 minutes of work to automate this. The file now even parses, checks the CSV for consistency, opens up the right program. Yay! [edit] At my girlfriend's company they liked the time-savings so much that they asked me to make a more extensive version (supporting more programs), and they rewarded me nicely. It's now saving them many (bored) man-hours every week and reducing the chance of mistakes! [/edit] Trackbacks
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I love linux too, for that very same reason, but when I'm forced to use windows, I use Autohotkey. It has fantastic documentation and is pretty simple to use. The only catch is that windows/dialogs take varying amounts of time to pop up, so you either have to insert "sleep, 400" statements in every other line, or do it properly with "wait for a window with this title" commands.
 Once that's all figured out, it's fantastic.
Hi Andy, don't I know you?
It was a real discovery to me, since I usually don't look for solutions to make windows more usable. I simply stopped using it when I knew I could work better under linux. My company sponsors wine so people can keep using some win32 apps under linux. |
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