Why didn't I tell you

I once had my own computer company, back in the old days of CP/M and DOS. We sold some hardware, software and supplies, gave support even to whoever walked into the shop or had our phone number, installed networks, did a lot of repairs (seldom on the goods we sold) troubleshooting and data recovery.

One day a guy walked in, he told that he and his partner had started a telephone message service/switch board for small businesses (this was the time that all phones were still connected to the wall). It appeared to be a niche and they were no longer able to do the administration by hand. I gave him the advice to buy an IBM compatible PC with Lotus 1-2-3. He took my advice, bought the complete set. A few days later he phoned me, to my surprise angry, with the question why I didn't tell him that Lotus was capable of running macro's.

When I told him honestly that most clients take a lot longer to master installing the software and learning how to use it, he answered "I'm not stupid, you know" and ended the conversation. It was the last thing I ever heard from him. But he did convince me of the fact that all those who perform routine jobs on computers without using macro's are actually using the computer as a luxury typewriter, not as a computer. I started pushing my own computer to the limits. Using Desqview I could automate some tasks in the background while performing tasks like writing letters, ordering goods, creating invoices in the foreground.

Since 1995 I've been retired for medical reasons. Windows 3.1 was already there with a built in macro recorder that was not built in with Windows 95, but the 3.1 version did the trick. Over time I found better macro recorders on the Internet and I was very glad that PaintShop Pro came both with batch processing, a macro recorder and Python script language built in. I also made and still make a lot of good use of UltraEdit's macro recorder/editor.

Now that photography is something I spend most of my time on, there are more and more tiny photo editing and organizing tasks that are hard to automate. I do my best to run most of these tasks while I'm in bed, but still too much tasks ask me to be there with mouse and keyboard. Today I found software that will probably allow me to automate all of these steps except for running a slide show in the morning, selecting the best results, throwing away the rest... and making coffee. It's name is Jitbit Macro Recorder, but it's far more than that. It comes with the most user friendly macro editing environment I've ever seen. It can even turn macro's into EXE's.

And what's best is actually a problem with most other macro recorders that are not built in like the ones in UltraEdit and PaintShop Pro. I often drag windows around on my screen, resize them and while doing so make it impossible for most macro recorders to play back what they recorded. The mouse goes to absolute positions on the screen and clicks there no matter if it finds anything to click on. That's also the default setting of Jitbit, don't ask me why. They also have this great SMART-Rec option. This is what the manual tells us about it:
SMART-Rec

Macro Recorder features unique "SMART-Rec" technology which gives intelligence to mouse recording. When this option is enabled (see settings) Macro Recorder will attempt to switch between window-relative and screen-relative coordinates when necessary. E.g. - when you perform some mouse actions with your desktop or taskbar, Macro Recorder will record your activity in absolute screen coordinates. But as soon as you switch to a specific window, Macro Recorder will start recording your actions in window-relative coordinates.

Screen-relative and window-relative mouse commands are displayed differently in the main window commands list. Window-relative coordinates are labeled "Rel X" and "Rel Y", and absolute coordinates are displayed as "X" and "Y".

In some cases this is not fool proof, for example in The Gimp. This open source picture editor uses dockable dialogs. If you drag these around, dock and undock dialogs all the time, even Jitbit isn't able to read your mind. I guess it's possible to tell Jitbit which exact dialog to use, using the editor, but I have not yet tried.

You can find Jitbit Macro Recorder at http://www.jitbit.com/macrorecorder.aspx . So please don't ever call me asking "why didn't you tell me ...?"