Re: Well, it's about time (HD on Win3)

On Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:11:51 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

I miss it but only for one reason.

Best/easiest mouse/kb macro recording I ever worked with.  Might have
been 3.11 though.

Recorder.exe -the macro recording tool- was first introduced with
Windows 3.0 in 1991.

I can't say if it was the BEST, but it was fairly impressive for the
time... all the moreso as it was built into the system from the start.
You basically started it up, then performed the actions you wanted
(e.g., Open Word, click File, click "New Document", type "Hello
World", highlight text, click bold, etc." or whatever you wanted)...
and then Recorder would save those actions and play them back
precisely.

It was, from what I recall, as fragile as the rest of Windows 3.1. It
mirrored your actions exactly, so if you used the mouse to click on
the file menu, but for whatever reason the file menu wasn't EXACTLY at
the same location (perhaps you had a different screen resolution or
the window wasn't positioned in the same spot) then the playback would
fail. Similarly, if the computer couldn't keep up (perhaps because
some background process was slowing things down) then it would break.

Still, considering how user-friendly it was to create the scripts and
how powerful the feature could be if it actually worked (and that it
was designed to run on something as slow as a 286 with 1MB RAM) it was
quite impressive.

Well, to me at least. I used it on occasion and thought it neat and
sometimes useful, but I couldn't help but imagine a more robust tool
probably existed. But as a freebie pack-in? Pretty neat.