Hero Inc.

A few months ago, one of the guys at work (“Sugar” Ray) sent me an email about a new FireFox extension I might find useful. iMacro is quite simply a way to “automate firefox.” Have you ever found yourself wanting to automate certain activities you perform daily within your browser? Or are you unsure what you would need to automate? Here’s a quick sample of ways I have used iMacro to simplify my life.

• Testing for Web Applications – At work, I often have to build new capabilities into a web application. For these capabilities I need test users that sometimes can become a very repetitious task to create. Instead of taking 30 minutes or longer to create maybe 4 users, I use iMacro. I record my actions, save the macro and then set it to run for about 20 times. I then “set it and forget it.” I can walk away for lunch or attend a meeting while my users are being created.
• Entering a daily contest – Recently there was a contest for the chance to win a newly designed/decorated house. The contest allowed you to enter daily for more chances to win. I didn’t want to enter the form information every day so I made a quick macro to fill out the form for me. Instead of the 2 minutes to fill out the form, I was filling out the form daily within 10 seconds.
• Wachovia / Quicken – My biggest and favorite use of iMacro is with my bank accont. Wachovia earlier this year determined that it would charge users a monthly cost for using programs such as Microsoft Money or Quicken. Anytime these programs were used to pull account information the monthly charge would be instituted. For the record, I know Wachovia would enter you into the monthly charge even if you stopped using the program. To prevent the charge from appearing, one would need to stop using Money or Quicken as well as call and have yourself removed from the monthly charge. In order to keep the simplified way of using Quicken, I created a simple macro that would quickly login to my account and download the latest account information. By “manually” downloading the information, the charge would not apply. I was once again back on top of my finances and performing the same task I was before but now it was for free.

For advanced users, iMacro can utilize javascript for more programatic features but for simple every day use, it isn’t necessary. iMacro also comes with many sample macros to help you enhance your current macros or learn the capabilities of what iMacro can do for you. If anyone has any great macros they would like to share, please let me know. I’d love to hear them.