Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite things in the world is learning a new software tool. I never do digital graphics or art, but I've spent hundreds of hours fooling around in photoshop because learning the tools, keybinds, workflows, documentation, etc is super fun.

Recently I found out about a very old piece of automation software written by 1 guy in India in like 2005. I've been using it to write botting scripts for a video game and its incredible. The documentation is purely 5 minute youtube videos where the developer types in notepad and clicks around the tool. Exploring the quirks, using it in uniqiue ways... really brings me back to being a kid with my first desktop computer. I'll never forget learning to dual boot linux, and now I'm in that same stage of discovery and awe. Everything is a puzzle of things I don't undstand and I need to be patient and creative to achieve what I want.

I'd be interested to know which automation software you're referring to. I've spent a bit of time (particularly when I was younger and more interested in gaming) doing the same leveraging things like AutoIt all the way up to C#. I'm interested in what makes the automation software you've found inspiringly unique!

https://www.murgee.com/auto-mouse-clicker/

Looks similar to a nocode version of autoit maybe. Its one of those tools that is challenging to understand but has incredible amounts of power. If you're familiar with old school runescape, it lets me set up a pretty nuanced bot for almost any acitivity in the game in about an hour. There are 150 actions, and a ridiculous number of settings. Many of the actions are ones I wouldn't think of when doing automation, but turn out to be useful (ie waiting for the count of colors within a certain area to be above or below a threshold).

Surely one of those things most people here would look at and prefer to write python on their own!

This is really cool actually. Do you know of any use cases for such automations (clicking or moving of mice) in the work setting?

One I have used for years is because one of our vendors doesn’t have an api and only allows 30 day timeframes for data downloads. So to get one year of data you have to download 12 reports manually, switching the dates, etc. or I open murgee, click f2, and wait 2 minutes.

In adtech a lot of people are very technically adept but never learned to code so tools like that can fill needs quite well. Even if a vendor has an api I’d have to get product to dedicate hours/etc etc, or I can write a little automation and skip the api.

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