News :: 15MR: xStarter
Hello all and welcome to another 15MR! Today’s application is xStarter published by xStarter Solutions—an advanced scheduler, macro application and much more.
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“xStarter will help you to automate each and every process in your computer. Automate operations on schedule, or on a keypress or via various events (windows event log changes, file/folder modifications, signals from an TCP/IP, RS232 port, etc.)
Here are just a few examples of what xStarter can do for you: The program can start/stop processes and services, send keys to applications or play pre-recorded macros imitating a real user. It can manage your files automatically, analyze file lists and synchronize directories. xStarter can work with archives, download webpages and analyze their contents in order to select proper actions. xStarter can synchronize files via FTP and work with your e-mail.
Quick Pros
- Fairly easy to use relative to its complexity
- A lot of actions available to manipulate
- If/Then/Else very powerful
- Ability to compile into mini applications great for family, clients, etc.
Quick Cons
- Incomplete help files
- Forums not up yet
- Could, of course, have even more actions
- Lack of screen detection routines
Expansion
I am very impressed with this program. I hate Windows Scheduler and doing anything more than very basic tasks with it. This application however is not just a substitution for that however. You can build your own email checkers, script your own backup applications including compression and FTP, write applications to monitor a server and IM/netmessage/email/etc. The list is pretty long what is popping into my head. On top of this, the ability to compile these into small executables make them all the more cool. Need to script a basic backup application for a client? You can do it here! I made a few of my own, tinkered around with their examples, and they all work great.
Of course, expansion on the actions would be great too. While this covers a lot, it doesn’t cover it all. For example, a few handy actions would be screen monitoring; Watch to see if certain pixels show up and if so, they trigger an event. I haven’t used it in two years, but there was a game macro scripting program (can’t remember the name and can’t find it now that I’m looking for it) that would watch the screen for a pixel or pixelset and trigger and action when it saw those pixels. While I’m sure the devs didn’t have this in mind, this application I would think could be very quickly modded to do this and add another customer level, or even make an xStarter specifically for gamers too. There are many other action additions I think would be great. SQL queries would be a great add-on, as well as web monitoring. It might be advantageous of the author to release a how-to build your own action (if possible) and get the users to build and post their own.
The only other issue I have is the incomplete helpfiles. It’d be nice to see what all we can ‘IF’ and how all it can be handled. Actions such as ‘TurnOn’ does not have any help either, as does some other actions which did make this a little more difficult for usage, and would make more difficult for a beginner to use.
Final Verdict
For anyone who uses Windows Scheduler and is tired of building .bat files to trigger, or people who want a little more control of their macroing and such, this may just be the application for you. While granted it doesn’t do everything I would want in an application, the application does show great potential and is a great application in itself. It is definately worth getting right now while its free, and is worth $39.99 for anyone who does a lot of scheduling tasks, works with servers or the such. As well, I would like to point out xStarter Web Pilot which is essentially a web-interface version of xStarter, which would be great addition for those who do remote server/system management. That application is only $59.99, or $19.99 upgrade from xStarter.
Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, February 16, 2007
