Automa – Automate the browser by connecting blocks | Hacker News Reader

Automa – Automate the browser by connecting blocks

automa.site

114 pointsjudiisis10 comments

Visually a very nice UI! From a feature point of view, is there a difference to existing open-source web automation tools like selenium ide or ui.vision?

Tried out Automa a few months ago. The UI was pretty, but the UX had much to be desired and I had constant trouble with it. I just reenabled the extension, and everything does appear to be greatly improved.

Previously, I think (i'm fuzzy on the details) that whenever I needed to start selecting elements within a page to set a css selector is when it all started to go downhill. The selection process was severely broken somehow and/or it was impossible to just manually set the CSS selectors. I'm pretty sure I couldn't figure out how to set a selector without doing an element select first, after which I couldn't edit the selector without it breaking everything and having to delete the workflow and start over.

Now a CSS selector text input is definitely right there next to the "select element" button, and editing works successfully.

But the "select an element" process still doesn't make complete sense to me. When I'm in the dashboard creating a new workflow and click the select element button, nothing happens. I tried executing the workflow so it opens the desired page, but I can't click around to select something even though the button appears to be highlighted. It does look like I can open the extension menu and use the select element process from there successfully, which lets me figure out the correct selector without having to open devtools.

I'll have to do some more testing, but it looks like the improvements over the past few months put this back into the realm of "usable" from what I've seen so far.

out of curiosity- what are you using it for?

Things that I'd normally write a userscript for.

There are sites that I visit on a somewhat regular basis and always perform the same actions, or get specific information from. My hope was that I could quickly create automa workflows faster than writing a userscript.

A very basic example is that when I visit TheBloke on huggingface, I want to click the expand models button, filter the list to just GGUF models, and highlight the ones I haven't seen before with one color and another color for ones that have been updated.

Looks cool, im interested.

When I click on the documentation link in the landing page hamburger menu, navigation doesn’t happen (iPhone safari).

For me (Firefox on Android) the navigation does happen but the menu has to be manually closed.

Most automations are just lists of steps with very occasional branching/looping.

I think freeform graph is the wrong UX for that.

A vertical list like in Power Automate Desktop or MIT Scratch seems much better fit.

Agreed. So far, building macros (https://www.plato.io/blog/introducing-macros), we've found that if you provide an easy and immediate way to map program elements to their meaning, non-techies can understand pseudocode in the form of linear lists of actions, even with branching/looping via indentation.

I tried to use it to login somewhere and apparently the typing node types "emailyahoocom", instead of "email@yahoo.com"... weird.

But generally this is a very nice project.

How can it be integrated with n8n?

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