I remember when I used to use Macro Recorder to automate simple repetitive tasks — I especially liked its macro recording feature. It requires no programming and can easily get tedious jobs involving clicking and waiting done.
Since then, I've long moved past automating with basic mouse/keyboard emulation and have sunk deep into an API-driven approach — I just love how clean everything is when you can really program it. Well, that's a major reason why I started Divooka in the first place — lots of ecosystems and lots of tools we use are broken beyond repair and inherently NOT designed to be automated cleanly. MCP partly addressed that problem, but it's really just a modern remedy for mediocre design.
Either way, when I set out to implement procedural context for Divooka, desktop automation is nonetheless one of the first things that comes to mind. As we get more mature in OOP programming, generics, and recently achieved a true data structure algorithm implementation in Divooka, that is drawing closer.
In this short video, I show a desktop example for the automation toolbox that will come with the upcoming Divooka Explore. It's small, but it shows quite a few interesting things:
- It creates a countdown GUI using the Immediate GUI framework.
- It interacts with an opened window — in this case, the Paint program — through keyboard shortcuts and mouse input.
- It can parse a stroke-based font at runtime and draw text with it.
If you ask me, that's a lot of cool features in such a small example! Really excited, and there's still more work to do, so see you soon!