TinyTask: Small and Lightweight Automation Software

There are times when we need to perform a task over and over again which is very time consuming and boring. For example you are given a text file containing thousands of lines and you need to remove a couple of random characters at the end. The easiest way to do that using the keyboard is by pressing the End key, followed by the backspace key and finally the downwards key to start working on the next line. Imagine doing that for a thousand times… If you are a programmer, you could have easily coded a simple tool that automatically does all that by loading the text file into the tool. If you don’t know anything about programming, you will have to rely on “macro” to automate the task for you.

There are tons of macro software out there which I have reviewed a couple of them many years ago and some could be too advanced for you as they support simple coding. If you just want a plain and simple record and playback, then you should definitely give TinyTask a go.

TinyTask is free and portable. What TinyTask amazes me is the program itself is only 32KB in size and over 14KB are graphics, which means the executable portion is very small and efficient. Upon running TinyTask, a very small user interface with only 6 buttons will appear. If you don’t know what are the buttons for, move the mouse cursor over to the icons and the titlebar will update to display the function. The first button from the left is Open, Save, Record, Play, Compile and Options.

The Open button is for loading a recorded marcro for playback. This is normally used AFTER you’ve saved a recording. As for the Save button, it is for saving a recorded macro and it saves under the .rec extension. The third button is probably the most important function which is to start and stop recording. You can either click on the icon or use the shortcut key Ctrl + Shift + Alt + R. Once you’ve finished recording, click the fourth button which is to play and test the recorded macro. If you’re satisfied with it, you can now EITHER click on the fifth button to compile the recorded macro into a single portable standalone program so that it can be used without TinyTask or click the Save button.

There are pros and cons in saving the macro in .rec file or compiling it to an .exe file. Once compiled into an EXE file, you can run the macro without TinyTask. However, the play speed and repeat count/continuous playback option are hardcoded during compilation and can no longer be changed. If you save it into a .rec file, it requires TinyTask to run but you can set the play speed and repeat count/continuous playback.

The last button offers you to set the play speed of the recorded macro, continuous playback or set the repeat count. Be careful of using the continuous playback option because you may not have a chance of terminating the macro if the actions are being performed too quickly.

I haven’t been able to access the official website of TinyTask because of an infinite refresh looping problem on their website. I checked the HTML source code and it shows the following code “meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; URL=http://www.vtaskstudio.com” which means the page will refresh at every 0 seconds redirecting to vtaskstudio.com. I’ve contacted them via email to report the problem. In the meantime, you can download the latest version of TinyTask from Softpedia.

[ Download TinyTask from Softpedia ]

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