15-Minute Reviews :: MouseRobot v1.4.0.219

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is MouseRobot version 1.4.0.219 by AutomationBox.com – An application to build macros to speed productivity.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“MouseRobot – a convenient tool for automating routine user tasks under Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP or Windows 2003.

MouseRobot is very simple and easy to use. Anyone familiar with Windows can learn to use MouseRobot effectively in 10 to 15 minutes.

Some applications, such as Microsoft Word or Corel Draw, have built-in tools that allow you to record a sequence of actions and then execute them as a single macro. But most applications don’t have such a feature. MouseRobot fills this gap and even allows coordination of interactions among several applications.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is straightforward but does have confusing points
• Macro steps displayed visually
• Inputting of new mouse steps relatively easy
• Mouse macros are object-based
• Keyboard functionality is surprisingly fairly powerful

Quick Cons

• No drag and drop support for reordering
• Confusion on features and visual feedback
• Locks out mouse use during macro playback
• Helpfile is not detailled enough
• Found at times that screenshot didn’t show anything
• Does not seem to always find its click destination

Expansion

The interface on this application is relatively straightforward for the most part to understand. On the left of the screen you will find a scroll window which shows all your current actions with a little thumbnail, what kind of action it is and the delay setting. The right side of the window displays information related to the inserted actions. There are two tabs on the right side to choose Mouse or Keyboard action, and then the related information to that action. Below this are the Wait settings as well, including ‘Wait for repeats count’, ‘Wait for time (milliseconds)’ and ‘Unlimited wait’. Above these two sections are buttons for managing the actual process, including buttons to add a series of actions or insert an action in between other actions.

While many other macro creation applications rely on either a macro recording function where the application records all of your actions or a script-building system (Or both), this application instead works on the premise of building your macro step by step via a slightly different method. The mouse entry is quite ingenius for the most part; Instead of recording your clicks, it watches the screen, putting red boxes around the object you are over for focus and then when you press Control, it records the object and the position over the object, which should make the application less reliant on window positioning and more accurate than some other macroing applications. The keyboard function gives you the capability to manage the use of all of the keyboard as well, including pressing control, alt and the windows key plus insertion of parameters and such. The application overall is a pretty interesting concept for a macro recorder, but does seem to need some work.

While the application is relatively easy to understand, there is some sticking points here however. There is no drag and drop support; You have to reorder your macro by using the up and down arrows in the toolbar or the right-click menu, which if your macro is long, it could be very tedious.

The options for ‘Waits’ were very vague; The default Wait for time is 5000ms and marks itself on each step as such, however if you don’t alter the default wait time, it actually goes off of the wait time you mark in the Options instead of 5000ms. There should be another option in the Wait area for choosing the default wait (and display it in the visual display of the macro) and give the ability to control the default timer (5000ms is way too long for mose uses). As well, ‘Wait for repeats count’ is confusing as best, and ‘Unlimited wait’ seems pointless. The help file does not give a lot of pertinent information on this topic either. While you are playing back a macro that you do get locked out from actually clicking your mouse or doing much of anything during these waits, making it near impossible to click the stop button. This could be an issue if you accidentally set a macro to wait for 600000ms instead of 60000ms either.

There were a few times where the application would not display a thumbnail of the clicked area, only a mouse pointer in the middle of a white square; This could cause confusion when editing a macro later. This issue did not seem specific to a mouse action, it more seemed to occur sporadically.

As for the object-based clicking, while it is quite powerful, it does seem to be a bit weak at the same go. In the case of web browsing, the application could not find an object which is off-screen in the scroll box; Instead, you have to record a macro to scroll down to the part of the window to display the object (Say a link to click on) and then have it click on the object. This could make macroing on variable-data windows difficult at best. As an example, if the descriptions vary enough at Giveaway of the Day, the button for clicking on for entering the download page could be high or low enough to be missed on the page during scroll down. While testing this, if the object wasn’t visible, it would actually click something else such as the Minimize button.

Final Verdict

While the concept of this application is interesting (Manual macro creation via object detection), it just doesn’t seem to function well at times during testing. Mix this with the poor feedback on the waits and it is hard to recommend this application, even while free. This application does show a great amount of potential, but does need some maturing in functionality, capability and ease of use first before it would be a viable solution. (Regular price for this title: $30).

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, December 18, 2007