Automagica: Open-Source Robotic Process Automation

The crux of desktop automation isn't that you can do the easy things, but that you have a way of doing everything. A 99% automated process with one manual step in the middle is still pretty useless.

Which is the reason the major vendors tend to have been in business for 10+ years. Because it's not about wrapping the Windows Active Accessibility API (or whatever they're calling it now) and patting yourself on the back.

It's about supporting, out of the box, that VB6 app with a hacked-in async UI interaction using a custom grid with a combo box in it.

And it's about exposing it in a way that, ideally, a business use familiar with Visio-only can kludge together 85% of the logic.

In short, this looks like all those times HN opines on {biology / rocketry / etc} and offers that "If they just ____, it would all be easy."

Every automation requires paying carefull attention to business process, designing it to handle all possible scenarios,handle sudden failures gracefully, and recover and restart from a known state. This is doable but requires a large attention span, most enterprise projects evangelist gets completely deranged if it can't be done in 2 weeks because hey we are agile.

As an example most Enterprise are on cloud because it's cool. It still takes 2 months to get an approval, VM provision still happens with hand, Dev still insist on running their instances 24x7 and get away with it.

Irony is every single one of them talks of how cool DevOps is but never gets it implemented because once it's done their will feel unloved.

Cloud was cool 2 years back. Currently it's automation, cloud cost control products, access management tool,agile (daily 2 hour standup) and RPA.

I am intrigued how these trends get started.

Yeah, and I'll be honest I didn't see this coming...Or at least, i didn't see the enterprise popularity aspect coming...Sort of because I kind of thought automation of this type was a solved thing. But i guess not. For most of my career, I've worked in web and/or digital marketing roles...so automation stuff was most often taken care on the server side via bash scripts, etc. And for desktop stuff, I assumed those who needed it, simply set up desktop automation via Applescript for macs, windows task scheduler for windows, macros specifically for excel, and of course the classic bash scripts for linux...So, color me surprised when I recently heard so much buzz around this weirdo "RPA" (robot process automation) stuff. Honestly, half of it seems somewhat reasonable. For the other half, i think this is just a bunch of IT consultants, platform developers/vendors, etc. colluding to get tons of enterprise money to create or expand an industry to capitalize on the perceptions that humans "should" be automated away. I feel uneasy learning this stuff for my dayjob, knowing the long-term effects might negatively impact someone's livelihood. I know there are orgs. out there who would give their idle humans more creative/fullfilling work out there...But i also know some orgs. who care less, and simply slash humans from their ranks chasing the almighty dollar regardless of the human cost. I guess the only upside is that this appears to be an open source software, so i guess that's good. <sigh>

> Automagica officially supports Windows 10. Linux and MacOS are not officially supported.

It's cross platform, and Windows 10 is officially supported.

DON'T CALL IT CROSS-PLATFORM WHEN IT ISN'T.

Lying isn't acceptable just because a president does it.