Windows task made automatic

Automate & Speedup Windows Tasks

What are computers for? Well, there may be a thousand answers to it, but one common answer you may find – they are used to automate and speedup tasks. Computer programs and applications are devised to make your life easy and to perform certain complex tasks speedier for you. Now what about the task of automating & speeding up these applications? There are Task Schedulers, Macros, Scripts such as Shell and VB Scripts and all kinds of other tools including some programs that further automate your computing tasks for you. Some such Windows applications are evaluated for you to choose from to make your life further easy.

Doc Commander:

Imagine your applications like Windows95 Notepad that has Open/Save dialog box with functionality like and beyond the Open/Save dialog box of MS OfficeXP! Doc Commander can add some such extremely useful functionality to all of your common Windows applications to make your computing life further easy. Some of these are:

• You can access all type of your recent documents in any application’s Open/Save dialog box which were either not available or restricted to up to 15 most recent files.
• You can access any folder; add file or folder within Open/Save dialog box.
• It adds file search facility in Open/Save dialog box.
• Fonts and other display settings for Open/Save dialog box are fully customizable and resizable.
• It adds a back button in Open/Save dialog box.
• Doc Commander improves file type filter mask in Open/Save dialog box of Windows applications.

Upon installation, this tiny application fully integrates in to Windows and replaces the traditional Open/Save dialog box of your native application by its own, which has added functionality mentioned above and more. Doc Commander adds Open/Save dialog box similar to the Open/Save dialog box of Windows XP. It has tabs for Desktop, Favorites, My Documents, Super Recent and Network Neighbourhood and simply clicking on any of these tabs will let you open/save files to that location. Try it by downloading from web site: http://www.utilityplanet.com

Symbol Commander:

Tired of giving Windows commands from your keyboard or suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome due to millions of mouse clicks? Here is an application called Symbol Commander that performs these tasks by symbols that you draw by dragging your mouse pointer instead of mouse clicking anywhere in the Window. For example, if you draw w it will open Microsoft Word for you. Drawing s will save the opened document in active window. Besides common Windows tasks such as Copy, Paste, Maximize, Minimize, Back, Forward etc., you can also perform complex task like sending e-mail and online banking by drawing symbol through your single mouse pointer movements with the help of this application.

Symbol Commander constantly watch your mouse pointer movements to interpret as command and lets you to disable itself in certain environment such as when you run graphic application like Windows Paint program so that when you draw scenery, it does not interpret it as commands and perform a task. You can add or remove such applications from its preferences menu. Further, to interpret your mouse movements as commands, you have to draw the symbols in fairly large size and with a single stroke else it will fail to sense it as a command. There are more than 20 default symbols for performing everyday common tasks which are easy to remember and you have the option to change or customize these symbols for different tasks. You can download the trial version of this application from http://www.sensiva.com.

Automate:

This application is a better replacement of Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler and performs better than most Macro programs. It acted as productivity tool comparable to Visual Basic Scripts that can be used without the need of knowledge of Programming languages and without writing absurd script codes. With Automate, you can perform your tasks automatically without any help or intervention and it is fully extensible to perform virtually any task of Windows.

Automate lets your task to run at any specific time and at any specific interval. Windows applications or tasks can be set to trigger in a specific Windows event, time or when pressing certain key combinations. With Automate, you can perform complex task by recording and saving your mouse movements, mouse clicks and key strokes and then playing it back through a single mouse click. You can send pre recorded key strokes to any application that accepts key strokes. You can assign triggers to perform tasks in any or combination methods such as Specified time and frequency, specified keys are pressed, specified file or folder changes, specified series of keystrokes, specified window appears, Computer is idle, Screen saver starts, user logout of Windows; System goes low on memory etc. It has a configuration manager through which you can add or modify the tasks and its behaviors. Automate records its entire task in a log file to view and analyze at a later stage. Evaluation version of Automate is available at http://www.unisyn.com

Screenshot Descriptions:

1. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander has built in tutorial that lets you learn using Symbol Commander easily and quickly.
2. Easy1.jpg There are more than 20 easy to remember default Symbols that can be used to perform everyday Windows task with the help of Symbol Commander.
3. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander can be set through its preference settings to automate your everyday computing tasks.
4. Easy1.jpg Launch Symbol Commander, press right mouse button, draw a symbol W anywhere in your computer screen. Microsoft Word [if installed] will launch immediately.
5. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander will close the application on focus when you draw Symbol X on it.
6. Easy1.jpg Life is really easy with Symbol Commander- simply draw symbol E to launch Microsoft Excel.
7. Easy1.jpg When you draw symbol @ , Symbol Commander will open your default email client.
8. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander can remember User Name and Passwords of your email accounts.
9. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander helps you in surfing Web sites. If you draw horizontal line with left to right stroke, you will go forward and when you draw the same line with right to left stroke, you will go back to previous site. Diagonal straight line will maximize or minimize the window.
10. Easy1.jpg Simply draw the symbol Y and Symbol commander will take you to web site of Yahoo.com or any other site that you specify.
11. Easy1.jpg You can customize a symbol by adding actions in Symbol Commander.
12. Easy1.jpg Unisyn’s Automate4 is a task automation tool which has powerful features for task automations.
13. Easy1.jpg Automate has an easy to use configuration manager through which you can assign the steps by which task is to be accomplished automatically.
14. Easy1.jpg Automate has Wizard type interface for easy use.
15. Easy1.jpg Automate’s task properties can be edited for exact approach the way task should accomplish. For example, In a task that runs MS Word, adding key stroke %fo in its task opens file Open Menu automatically.
16. Easy1.jpg Doc Commander’s file Open/Save dialog box is fully customizable, even you can change font size and color that be only changed by changing system fonts in usual ways.
17. Easy1.jpg Doc Commander’s file Open/Save dialog box has more features than that of Windows XP or MS Office XP.
18. Easy1.jpg Doc Commander provides you Super Recent Documents that helps you to track all of your recently used files, no restrictions of 15 most recent files. There is in built search facility too.
19. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander’s Symbols can be changed to user’s likings and any symbol can be assigned to any task.
20. Easy1.jpg Symbol Commander, the Windows application that automates your computing task. It interprets simple mouse pointer movements as commands and performs tasks accordingly.

(The article has been published earlier in IT Magazine.)