Review: Jitbit Macro Recorder

---

Computers are good at repetitive, mindless tasks. The kind that require great precision and patience but no imagination or choices. Exactly the kind which humans are no good at, and make working life unbearable.

Half the point of technology is to do away with that kind of drudgery. The other half is to help us do the things we did beforehand, but faster, better, or just more.

All of which is a bit odd really, because most of the things we do sitting at a computer are repetitive, mindless tasks that require great precision and patience but no imagination or choices.

The tedium of adding up a column of figures with a pencil has been replaced with the tedium of typing in a much longer column of figures, which are magically totted up by the spreadsheet.

If only there were some program which could watch you do some thankless task on another program, once, then do the same thing, much quicker and without errors for a thousand iterations, while you go and do something interesting. Probably on another computer.

Well, there are such programs. And while they can't transcribe your handwritten notes or turn them into the polished prose of the novel you're trying to write¹, they can record your keyboard and mouse actions, help you fine tune them, and play them back in a loop.

The one I use at the moment is called Axife Mouse Recorder, and it's free demo. I can't register it to get the full version because...the company I'd register with is long bankrupt. But it's still one of the most popular programs of its kind because, frankly, it's very good and most of the competition² is rubbish.

There are a few good alternatives though. vTask is much more configurable, and its free little brother TinyTask (also in portable version) is great for quick-and-dirty task automation³.

I'm going to be looking at the Jitbit Macro Recorder, to see if its longer feature list and user friendliness are enough to make me switch from my trusty but crippled Axife demo.

Jitbit, incidentally, have an innovative marketing strategy, whereby if someone with a blog reviews their program, the blogger gets a free personal-use licence for it. Good idea isn't it?

Now, I'm working on a project at the moment where I've got 466 text files containing numbers describing the shape of different sound waves. Each wave has 1778 points, and I need to open each file in turn, transcribe every point into another program, then save the result, and move onto the next file.

I've recorded a script in the Axife program, and the first screenful looks like this:



Now here's the same series of operations, recorded in JitBit Macro Recorder:



Both programs can record mouse movements, mouse clicks and keyboard activity, but for both I've recorded only the latter two. In effect, the mouse pointer will jump instantly to wherever it's needed, and any actions like selecting text, copying and pasting are done with the keyboard.

I've also edited the scripts so the delays between keypresses are much shorter than humanly possible - though I need to introduce delays occasionally for things like filesaving, so the computer can keep up.

Removing (or not recording) mouse movements and minimising delays means one wave takes about six minutes to transcribe - and all 466 should take about 40 hours.

At a rough calculation, it would take me about 1000 hours, working nonstop to do the same thing the old fashioned way. That's not just a bigger task - without automation I wouldn't even consider trying.

The other thing to notice is: I've put loops in the scripts. The most important one is a single copy-and-paste from a line in Windows Notepad to a corresponding point in Propellerhead Reason, looped 1778 times⁴.





So, what are the things I prefer about Axife, what do I think is better in Jitbit...and what's missing (so far) from both?

The Axife display is neater, more compact, better thought out. The delays don't take up a whole line, and the mouse click details easier to interpret as a gestalt.

The basic script editing facilities are the same between the two - move, cut, copy, paste, change event type and change co-ordinates. But Jitbit has a load of extra things you can do.



You can open and copy files directly, switch between windows and wait for them to close before moving to the next event - though unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with DOS windows, so you can't run a series of batch files in a row.

You can launch websites, play macros within macros, pause to ask for user input and perform various clipboard operations. All things I wouldn't use often, but it's good to have them.



But here's the big one. Your macro is no longer limited to doing the same thing over and over again - it can branch. It can make decisions - if a file exists, if the clipboard contains certain text, if a process exists or a window's in focus, if the user inputs this string but not that string....

You've actually got a simple programming language, which means you've got the option of a complex, context sensitive macro. With some ingenuity, you can even make it pick up on whether something's gone wrong - so it'll exit instead of trying to copy from the same non-existent window until you stop it.

There's other things too. If the button you want to click has moved, there's a 'Smart-Rec' feature to find it. You can put labels and comments in your script - useful because all but the simplest get very confusing.

Which leads me to thoughts of what could be better. When you look at a raw, newly recorded script, it can be baffling - even though you've just done the operations which it shows. Does this mouseclick refer to this window or that one? Is that click a window focus or a data selection? Is that copy operation the one for the third block of data, or the filename? Is this where the loop should end?



It would be much easier if I could press a hotkey while recording, type in a label to describe what I'm about to do, then press the key again, and continue⁵. A kind of writing notes in the margin to yourself, for when you come to the editing.

Some macro recorders have little to recommend them except the ability to do arithmetical operations on data before pasting it. Strangely, Jitbit can't do that, so I'm left pasting data into Windows Calculator or Excel, then copying the result. On this point the similar vTask pulls ahead in the race.



Finally, it would be a lot neater to have the option to display common keypress sequences as operations. Instead of four lines showing 'Hold CTRL', 'Hold X', 'Release X' and 'Release CTRL', just have a line showing "Cut". Even reducing 'Hold Enter' + 'Release Enter' as 'Enter' would help readability and reduce clutter.

In principle, you could make your own shortcuts like these with the 'Goto' or 'Play Macro' commands, but I'm looking to make macros quickly, not spend hours on workarounds to make them tidier.



So, have I been persuaded by Jitbit's Macro Recorder? I think I will use it, but not exclusively. TinyTask is still good for taking a few seconds to make basic macros, Axife occupies the middle ground, and if I'm working on a complicated procedure involving several different programs in sequence (my personal record, by the way, is seven) then Jitbit's Macro Recorder will be invaluable.





¹ At least, not until laptops come fitted with robot arms for turning pages and moving webcams around. If they ever do, your computer will be able to read you bedtime stories from a real book.

² It's a crowded market. A quick google search gives the high end products like Ranorax Recorder and WinAutomation, plus dozens of basic free or shareware ones like Mouse Recorder, Advanced Key And Mouse Recorder, and Mouse Recorder Pro, and autoclickerextreme - which probably wins the prize of Most Ambiguously Suggestive Name.

³ I've got an old tower PC with an even older video capture card, plugged into Film 4 on an old Freeview box - recording...old films. I tried for a week to get the PVR software to work properly - now I've got ShutDownExpert running two EXE mouse control scripts - one to activate VirtualDub to start recording, the other to stop it. It's clunky, but unlike the software designed for the task, it works.

⁴ The screenshots for this review were converted to JPG using photoshop...automated in Jitbit's program. While I poured another cup of tea.

⁵ I don't know of any programs which do this, but it would seriously help the editing process.

---