December 2022 AutoHotkey Newsletter

AutoHotkey Newsletter December 2022

Howdy %Name%,

If you boil down your personal, career, and , financial goals, into a single overriding objective it is the desire for greater control. Ironically, as much as we desire greater control, we are the ones who often give it away. Every time we say:

It’s the location of our business
It’s my genes / parents / partner / co-worker / spouse / supervisor / etc.
It’s the season
It’s the economy
It’s the _______________

Each and every time we say an “it’s the…” We’re doing two things simultaneously:

we push away a small “weight” of responsibility which, temporarily, makes us feel “better”
we give up an equal-sized amount of control which will later cause us anxiety

Only by taking on more responsibility can we have more control. Once you realize you are in charge of your future, you are one step closer to achieving great things❗

Now on with the show…

Black Friday Sale ends soon! Save 40% on everything we offer!

AutoHotkey V2 is out of beta! 😲😲

Isaias and I were both really surprised to see that AutoHotkey V2 was out of beta. The version is currently entitled “RC” which stands for “Release Candidate” but I like to think of it as meaning “really close”. LOL

In his comments Lexikos says he’s planning to release it “this year”. Wow! Have you begun to work with AutoHotkey V2?

AutoHotkey V2 is no longer in Beta❗ Planned to be released in 2022 😲

9 ways to Web scrape with AutoHotkey AHK Hero Webinar

Last Friday we invited AHK Hero members to a webinar discussing pros/cons of 9 different approaches to Web Scraping with AutoHotkey❗ We discussed many different aspects of each one. While the webinar was only available to AHK Hero members, we are letting people watch it. If you’d been an AHK Hero, you could have been there to ask YOUR questions!

Web Scraping with AutoHotkey: The ultimate guide for 2023

We have a few more days to take advantage of the 40% discount code “IndependantMeBlackFriday” offered for Black Friday. Don’t miss this deal; You’ll hate yourself later!

Getting around an Automation warning in Outlook

Several of our clients have us automating Outlook for them. They were seeing a “stupid” automation warning from Outlook. We looked around and found a simple, albeit weird, way to solve the problem.

Outlook Warning: “A program is trying to access e-mail address information”

Using Excel to create an editable grid

A new client (thanks for the referral Jean Lalonde), and AHK Hero member, had created a tool similar in some ways to Quick Access Popup however he was having some difficulties with the GUI. One need was to have a fully-editable ListView. In AutoHotkey you can easily edit the first column however, to edit the other cells, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. We discussed the client’s need and proposed using Excel to provide the grid. With a little work we were able to hide everything except for the grid.

Excel is an amazingly powerful tool so he now has amazing functionality built into his tool with only 1 hour of our time being used!

Creating an editable Grid in AutoHotkey- Excel saves the day❗

Rendering Modern websites in AutoHotkey

An AHK Hero member was wanting to display Google maps in an a GUI. Since we’d come up with a solution for another Hero member we thought we’d all get on a call and talk through how to do it in AutoHotkey V2.

How to Display Modern Websites inside an AHK GUI (🆕 WebView2 Runtime)

Adding custom information to a GUI event in AutoHotkey

A YouTube subscriber asked a question on one of our GUI videos about being able to pass parameters from a “button click” on an AutoHotkey GUI. In AHK V1 this is a fairly complicated topic as you need to bind it to the function so Isaias suggested we create a video demonstrating it and showing how much cleaner the code is when achieving the same goal in V2.

How to add custom information to a GUI event in AutoHotkey v1 & V2

📚 What we’re reading

How to Find the Smallest or Largest Number in Microsoft Excel
How to Hide Reels on Facebook
How to Disable Bing in the Windows 11 Start Menu

⚡️Productivity tips

One great tip for getting more done the next day is to drift-off to sleep thinking about a task you need to do the next day. Amazingly your subconscious will get to work for you while you sleep! 💤

🤣 A spot of Humor

I know a few people I’d like to send this to. How about you %Name%?

unsub

AHK Hero?

Want more time than the free hour? Have content that you can’t have on YouTube? Consider joining the 🦸‍♀️AHK Hero club! Members receive big discounts to courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.
They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and a 2nd “office hours” session which isn’t on YouTube.

🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

Don’t wait. The time will never be just right. — Napoleon Hill
There’s more pay off from self-improvement than improving anything else — Dan Kennedy
Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more. — Henry Ford
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. — Ayn Rand

Live AutoHotkey Support Tomorrow

Don’t forget on Friday’s you can get free AutoHotkey support on my YouTube channel. Or you can sign up for reminders and join the zoom room.

The-Automator

Joe, Isaias and staff

P.S. Don’t forget you can save 40% on everything we offer by using our Black Friday discount code IndependantMeBlackFriday. Sale ends soon so act now!

🎁 Black Friday Sale: Get huge savings on EVERYTHING❗ 😲

🎁 Save big during Black Friday Sale!

Yesterday I had an amazing Thanksgiving with my immediate family and I hope you did as well❗

I sent an email yesterday explaining what a horrible childhood I had to explain why I’m so thankful now. (and got some amazing replies that were very inspiring and heart-felt)

I think a lot of us that use AutoHotkey are incredibly grateful for the great & amazing community surrounding it. Our forum is full of “giving people”. As you’ll see in the AHK Hero group, AHK people are very kind and extremely helpful.

As a way of expressing my gratitude I’ve created a discount code for 40% off everything we offer. Use “IndependantMeBlackFriday” during checkout and you’ll receive 40% off anything you purchase between Today and Monday December 5^th.

Remember: you are the best asset you have!

Just click one of the items below and use the coupong during checkout

Joe, Isaias, and staff

P.S. the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.
The 2nd best time to plant a tree is today. So don’t wait and invest in yourself Today!

Why I’m Thankful: Happy Thanksgiving❗

Today I’m looking forward to an amazing Thanksgiving with my immediate family!

I know a lot of you are outside the US thus don’t celebrate Thanksgiving however it’s probably the one holiday that I think really should have global appeal.

Being thankful for what we have is a great way to stay humble and happy. Too many people have a sense of entitlement and feel they are “owed” more because they are being held-back.

I don’t talk much about what life was like for me growing up (as it isn’t really relevant to automation) however I can say that I was able to achieve great things in spite of the shitty life I had growing up.

Here are a couple of very short articles I wrote when I was in an English class in JR. college.

Tuesday.pdf
The Realization.pdf

These will give you a tiny glimpse into what I went through in Junior high & Highschool (grades 7-12)

You see, my mother was a full-blown alcoholic😵. Pretty much the worst of the worse❗

As an example, one day my siblings and I were all sitting around seeing who had the best “mom kicked me out of the house” story. I thought mine was pretty good when I told them I was 17 and a friend called me up when I was at work and told me my mom was putting my stuff on the front lawn.

Nope!

My sister was at the front of the line when she said “I was 16 and mom through a bunch of my clothes in a garbage bag and drove, and my puppy, to a bus stop and kicked us out” (You have to remember this was decades before cell phones existed.

Sadly this didn’t win either.

My brother topped it all off when he said “I don’t remember how old I was but I was in 2^nd or 3^rd grade and I was walking home and saw all my stuff on the front lawn because mom had kicked me out”.

Winner!

Anyway, my main point for mention all of this is I’ve seen some incredibly dark times and it’s probably why I’m so optimistic and grateful for what I have.

In a way I could probably thank my mother for her problems as it lead me, indirectly, to AutoHotkey. You see I learned as a young kid to be self-reliant. AutoHotkey enables us to do so much more and we don’t have to rely on people that will, for one reason or another, drop the ball and not deliver on their promises to you.

Having been through such dark and painful times gave me perspective. I’m Over the moon happy that I no longer have to deal with the unpredictability of my mother (not to mention a crap load of others in my family incapable of love)

What are you grateful for?

November 2022 AutoHotkey Newsletter

AutoHotkey Newsletter

AutoHotkey Newsletter November 10th, 2022

On November 10, 2003 Chris Mallet released the very first version of AutoHotkey(Beta .205)

We all owe Chris a huge Thank you❗

I just thought you’d like to know AutoHotkey has been around for 19 years now! I was lucky enough to stumble upon it around 2007.

I found AutoHotkey because I was tired of using AutoCorrect in MS office programs (mainly because, at the time, AutoCorrect didn’t sync between Word, Excel PowerPoint etc.) So HotStrings were my first love (which is why the HotStrings course was the first one I created)

Hard to believe that the beta Version of AutoHotkey 2 was released this year! Although we are expecting it to become the default version of AutoHotkey in 2024.

I just looked at my oldest backup of AutoHotkey.ahk file (which was from 2008) and it was quite a flash-back. When I first started using AutoHotkey I stuck with HotStrings and Hotkeys plus a little bit of bit of mouse clicks and a little RegEx to clean up text. Take a look at your original scripts. Have you “leveled-up”? If not, why not?

I know both I and AutoHotkey have come a long way over the past 19 years. If you haven’t progressed perhaps you should conser one of our courses to learn AutoHotkey?

To celebrate AutoHotkey’s 19^th birthday I’m creating a store wide coupon for 19% everything we offer!

In the next week you can get any of our courses for 19% off. Just go here and select a course that you want to purchase. Then use “AHK19Birthday” as the coupon code during checkout.

This also includes Tutoring, done for you Consulting or even signing up for our AHK Hero group.

This coupon code will be valid for 19 days (until November 29^th) but use it now to continue to improve yourself!

Joe, Isaias, and team

P.S. Can you imagine a world without AutoHotkey? I can and it is scary! I’ve saved an amazing amount of time using AutoHotkey. I hope you realize it is more than sending mouse clicks and key strokes. Use this email as a point to jump-start your knowledge and shift your strategy to working smarter, not harder.

AutoHotkey Newsletter November 3rd, 2022

Howdy %Name%,

Do you ever wish you could custom design your own future as a programmer / Automator?
Cool! Then I’ve got one heck of a counterintuitive tip for you.
First, line up all the mistakes possible in your gig.
Then… go MAKE them. All of ‘em. Yes, every last one.
Why?
Cuz 99% of learning is from what we do wrong, not what we do right.

Now on with the show…

Updates to the AHK Toolkit: Great way to test your code

I asked Isaias to spend some time on his AHK Toolkit. He made it super easy to switch between versions of AutoHotkey 😊. In this video we also discuss some of the other really cool features it has.

Streamline testing your code with this Update to AHK Toolkit

Adjusting Output window

Speaking of testing code, have you tried out our function that pays attention to the editor you are in and adjusts for you? Quite handy if you’re using more than one editor (or sharing your code with others that use a different editor). We discuss how to use it in this video but you can get the function here.

Debugging your scripts: Displaying text regardless of editors

Getting Properties from UIA

On a client call the other day we were extremely thankful for Descolada’s work on UIA. The programs we were automating were very “new” and impossible to peak inside of by any other method. It reminded me of this video where Isaias walks us through how to access properties.

How to easily access properties from UIA

🎃Spooky updates to AutoHotkey👻

On October 30^th Lexikos released updates to both V1 and V2. In this video Isaias and I discuss the tweaks / patches released in V1.1.35.00. BTW- have you begun to program in V2 yet?

Context Sensitive Hotkeys in v2

If you are working in V2, you’ll need to rethink Context sensitive hotkeys using the #HotIf directive.

This is because: IfWinactive, IfWinexist, etc. have been removed as AxleFublr explains in this video. If you’re wanting to learn V2, his channel, AHK All the Way, only uses V2. Incidentally he was on our live Friday AutoHotkey help call last week. Thanks for dropping in Axlfublr!

Sometimes stupid works🤦‍♂️!

As you should know we rarely send keystrokes & mouse clicks. That being said, sometimes you realize it would be handy to just send mouse clicks…. The other day I was cleaning up my spam folder and realized a 3-line, super simple, script would be extremely “handy” (excuse the pun).

Super simple script for cleaning up spam folder

Reading And Writing text files

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on an email drip campaign for people new to AutoHotkey. One of the emails is how to read/write text files. Since I’m super lazy I decided to just extract a video from the Intro to AutoHotkey course. In this short video I show you how easy it is to in AutoHotkey. I also show how you can easily check if a file exists or not.