Let’s say you use a piece of software which is horribly designed (or maybe you just don’t know how to use it properly) and you need to click a button thousands of times.

See specifics below if your are curious of my particular predicament!

Instead of clicking your mouse button like a crazy person - you can automate this task using software such as AutoHotKey. Using this software, it allows you to create a keyboard shortcut that lets you do a number of things without human intervention. This is handy for just about any sort of automated tasks where you find yourself clicking alot.

These instructions are for getting your mouse to click at a particular point on your screen a number of times.

Install AutoHotKey

First step of course is to install AutoHotKey.

Figure out where you need to click

Launch the included program AutoIt3 Window Spy. This will start reporting a bunch of information to you including Window Title and Class, Mouse Position, and other information that is useful if you are creating a more complicated AutoHotKey script.

Point the mouse to the Window where you want to click a bunch of times, at the place you wish to click. Make sure the window is active - this is important as we want to be specific as to where we click. Write down the coordinate for the “In Active Window”.

Create the Script

When you first run AutoHotKey (AHK from now on) it will ask you if you want to create a sample script in My Documents. Go ahead and do this.

At the bottom of this screen, add the following line:

!g::Click x,y,n

Where x = X coordinate, y = Y coordinate, and n = the number of times you want to click. For example in my use I used !g::Click 334,333,3000 which clicks in the active window at 334,333 exactly 3000 times.

!g means that the key combination will be Alt-G

Save this file and then Run AHK again. This will load it into memory.

Activate the window you wish to click in - then press Alt-G (at the same time)

Clicks away….

Your PC will click however many times in the active window at the specified location. Now your mouse will not wear down from the clicking and your time will also be saved!

Warning: Rant: This is why I needed to do this. The ever-fabulous Adobe Photoshop Elements does not have a great system to change your disk file structure. So when I wanted to change my photos directory from having lots of directories like 2006-01-23-10234323 into subdirectories like 2006/2006-01-23-10234323, it does not provide an easy way to do this. I wish it had advanced folder management like the MP3 Library Manager Media Monkey does - it allows you to rebuild your folders based on date, album, title, and just about every other piece of data imaginable. So when I did this manually and then wanted to “Reconnect” my photos to the correct location on the disk - Photoshop Elements has a horrible reconnect dialog that makes you click “Reconnect” on every picture you want to reconnect. I couldn’t find a way around this.

I know I’m a day late and a dollar short, but I wanted to throw in my thoughts on Apple, Inc.’s newly introduced iPhone. Besides pending trademark issue with the Cisco/Linksys iPhone, this looks like a great device. Even if they change its name - a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

A few years back, I predicted that in several years we would see massive convergence of three devices - the mp3 player, the cell phone, and the camera. You could also add in video player and web/email browser. Now, I’m not talking about the cameras we see on cell phones today - even the 2 megapixel versions that are out are really not that good at taking shots. The full convergence will be successful when it does each of these tasks well.

I knew it had not taken place yet, because the mp3 player/cell phones that have come out so far are pitiful. I bought a Motorola V360 last year, which has memory card support along with a built in mp3 player. However, the interface to this mp3 player was horrible. Every time you launched the java mp3 player applet, it would take up to a minute to load all of your songs. From there it took 30 more seconds to find the song you wish to play. This is not an experience you want to have.

Motorola then ditched it’s mp3 applet in favor of iTunes for cell phones. I was able to install it to my V360 via a hack - it wasn’t pretty but it worked and greatly improved the mp3 playing ability of the cell phone. However the full experience was still missing something.

Enter the new phone from Apple. It plays music, video, photos… and oh yeah it can make calls too. Apple has completely redone the interface, and it is different than any phone currently on the market. The call interface actually looks pretty Skype-ish, which is a good thing. The way you navigate the phone is different as it is a gigantic touch screen. I think there will be some resistance to this type of navigation (as well as the touch keyboard) but it will grow on people and eventually will become the standard on all cell phones. Why keep the whole keyboard there if you only need it a fraction of the time?

I want this phone. I want it bad. Personally, it will be great to have this phone. However, as a business class device, there are a few features I am concerned about, because if it does not support them then it is DOA in the workplace.

The first is its e-mail client. During the demos, you can see it handles photos flawlessly. What about office attachments? Word and excel spreadsheets? Being an Apple device I would not expect these functions to be built in but I am hopeful that Apple has enough sense that it will open it’s OS for development. This is tied into my second reservation. The OS it is running is based off of OS X:

All the power and sophistication of the world’s most advanced operating system — OS X — is now available on a small, handheld device that gives you access to true desktop-class applications and software, including rich HTML email, full-featured web browsing, and applications such as widgets, Safari, calendar, text messaging, Notes, and Address Book. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background. This software completely redefines what you can do with a mobile phone. [Source]

OS X is based off of BSD - will this be the case with this phone? If so, it should help developers add any kind of applet they can dream up of and will greatly enhance the usability of the phone. I hope Apple takes this direction.

My third reservation is the technology the phone is using. It is not a 3G phone, so the data rates seen on it will not be as good as the Cingular 8525, which uses the 3G UMTS/HSDPA network that Cingular is rolling out. However, the technologies used in this phone might just be enough to outweigh this drawback. It is also possible Apple decided not to use this new technology for cost reasons as the device is already at the upper end of what people will be willing to pay for a phone (especially on a 2 year contract).

Apple has a real winner with the iPhone. Expect this type of phone to really flourish in the next year or two. Apple has conquered my first two devices - mp3 player and cell phone. Once they get a quality 5 or 6 megapixel camera integrated, along with their famous Apple polished interface - Apple will finally have won the integrated device battle.