DonationCoder.com Software > Find And Run Robot

ActiveWords and Find&Run Robot

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Darwin:
Hi Mouser,

in another thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=752.new#new), you asked for ActiveWords users' impressions of that program in comparison to F&RR. One area that I feel makes ActiveWords amazing is the fact that there is no need to call up the program's interface in order to enter text (of course, this requires that the program be running in the background, monitoring your keystrokes). That is, if I want to open up Outlook I simply type "out" (sans quotes) and hit the spacebar twice and voila, Outlook opens. There is no user interface to interact with - I just type "out" and it opens - regardless of what app is active on my computer.

Now, I don't feel that F&RR should necessarily try to emulate ActiveWords in this regard. The result of the keyboard monitoring is that there are four AW processes running using up almost 40 MB of RAM versus F&RR which consumes at most about 18 MB RAM (more like between 3 and 8 on average) on my system.

At the end of the day, AW and F&RR do different things - even if there is some overlap. AW corrects all my spelling as I type, no matter what the application, it will insert huge chunks of boilerplate text into anything that I am typing - in any app, it will open applications using both preconfigured and user configured "active" words (see above), it will respond to an active word by opening up my webbrowser to a specific page, send an e-mail to a recipient in response to an active word (you can set it up to open up a blank e-mail for addressing and editing, open a blank e-mail addressed to a specific addressee, and open up a pre-authored e-mail either addressed to specific recipient(s) or with the address field blank, etc.).

This doesn't even cover what activewords can do. I use about 10% of the feature set and only understand a fraction of them... It's very, very powerful.

F&RR does some of the same things with a much smaller footprint. I think that that is its attraction. It is very elegant and inobtrusive. I wouldn't try to move it much beyond a file and program launcher. What I find amazing about it is that it is so quick without resorting to indexing. AW doesn't index the harddrive either, but neither does it search the way F&RR does (well, maybe it does - who knows? If it does I am unaware of it...).

Hope these very general comments are useful. I am sure that there are others reading this forum who are better able to comment.

Keep up the good work! I love what you've done with F&RR so far.

Mike

mouser:
very useful comments and i think very wise advice that mirrors my thinking.

people seem to like the low footprint of F+R and i think any constant monitoring of keyboard would be counter to what F+R users want, so all of those features are going to be left out of F+R.

the only thing i'll mention is that F+R now has (though we need to include a bunch of prewritten commands to make it a lot easier to use) a full system for supporting commands to:
launch web searches and any other kind of web-based stuff like dictionary lookups, etc., start mail messages, paste boilerplate text after selecting items from a menu, etc.

so i think in the area of the flexibility to launch certain kinds of commands and stuff that F+R might have the most to gain from looking at what ActiveWords did right, though the triggering system in the two cases is different.

kfitting:
This probably should go into another thread, but a quick question about the web stuff.  Can you just type a url into FindRUn and have it open a browser and go there?  This would be awesome for just going to a certain site.  Obviously, to do all the search and stuff you need alias' but it would be cool to be able to type donationcoder.com and have it come up.

Kevin

mouser:
you absolutely can - i posted an alias rule for it earlier.

i will include a bunch of useful aliases in the next major release.

mouser:
just to give you some idea of the flexibility of F+R,

in addition to making a rules so that you can type in any url to visit it with your browser you could also do something like make an alias group with 4 different browsers listed, so you could just type a url and then hit the key corresponding to which browser you wanted to use to surf there.  i know its not useful for many, but thought id mention it :)

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