Sikuli: Write scripts using GUI buttons and screenshots | Hacker News Reader

Sikuli: Write scripts using GUI buttons and screenshots

sikuli.org

99 pointsninetax10 comments

While this might not be news to some it's new to me. I don't normally use macros, but I'll certainly keep this in mind if the need ever comes up.

We used this to automate UI tests on an iOS app a couple of years ago (before they added the UI automation stuff). Seemed to work pretty well, though it was a fair bit of work to get it set up.

i made a fishing bot for wow using sikuli a while back - it was rudimentary but since fishing in wow is mostly just clicking the bobber, it worked pretty well. i'd let it go overnight and would wake up to bags full of fish every morning.

Sikuli is great. We use it to click on the "Sync Branch" button on GitHub app window every minute on our dashboard screen. Seeing a live stream of commits is very motivational.

The only problem is that the Sikuli scripts can stop working easily when you resize the window or restart the computer. Something changes on the screenshot so it stops finding the button.

Like already mentioned, not new. I used to this to QA-test and bot Farmville-style flash games when I was working on that (~3-4 yrs ago).

It's particularly good for situations where you know what you're expecting to see, but you don't know when or where it will appear.

I recall trying to use this in 2003 to automatically click on some car website to collect points so I could get a free flatscreen TV.

I ended up using AppleScript when Sikuli didn't work to automatically click the mouse every X number of seconds and only ended up with a free T-shirt. :(

I wrote a blog post about Sikuli a long while ago: http://randomtype.ca/blog/a-look-at-sikuli/

Fellow Chinese hackers should know the author, vgod, as he is pretty vocal in certain online Chinese communities.

Not exactly news, I've been using it for years. Very useful for automating things like cutting and pasting from pdf's.

I'd really like to see someone hook it up to SPAUN.

What's SPAUN? I'll let the Doctor explain http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2012/12/09/large-scale-neu...

http://nengo.ca/build-a-brain/spaunvideos

+1. Sikuli was a dream find a few months ago when I had to upload 100s of images for a rater survey to a locked-down LimeSurvey instance (no ftp allowed). 20 minutes and I had a functioning script that pushed all of the upload buttons and paste the next filename in sequence.

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