Friday, December 09, 2005

Graphical Batch Files

AutoMate This is a pretty interesting application that basically provides similar functionality that OSX Automator provides. While you can create customized tasks in VBA it has lots of interesting inbuilt functionality manipulating Excel, FTP, terminal emulation, keyboard and windows manipulation.

Related, but much simpler is a piece of software called, AutoIt which was "...initially designed for PC "roll out" situations to reliably configure thousands of PCs, but with the arrival of v3 it has become a powerful language able to cope with most scripting needs." Basically allowing simple automation of window, mouse and keyboard events.

1 comment:

James Webster said...

You might also be interested in checking out Windows Workflow, a workflow engine that will be embedded in WinFX (Vista). When I first saw the graphical workflow editor the first thing I thought was 'Automator'!, but I think it is actually more fully featured than that (ie. loops and decisions for a start). So maybe more like a 'lite' version of Biztalk.