Macros

Found the GNU/GPL program AutoHotkey. Download:

http://www.autohotkey.com/download/

Has macro recording in addition to many hotkey things.

The recorder, however, is kind of dumb, so it doesn't record mouse drags, etc.

• Avoid using the mouse! Especially with popups, since they can appear anywhere
• IE is a POS but it works better with AutoHotKeys because you can check to see if a page has finished loading. The instructions are the AutoHotKey FAQ.
• Note that, if you follow my advice and use only the keyboard, the statusbar check in the faq may fail after a few uses. The statusbar check in the faq moves the mouse into the upper left corner of the screen. IE seems to leave the status bar blank then. If you move it around a bit over the IE window then call the statusbar subroutine, it works fine.
  
• For popup forms, wait for the form to appear, Sleep, 100 then Send, {ALTDOWN}D{ALTUP}. This will select the address bar. Send, {TAB}and it will select the first link/form element on the page
• {CTRLDOWN}{TAB}{CTRLUP} goes through all the frames on the page. You can use ALT-D to go to the addressbar then CTRL-TAB to get to the right frame, then tab to get the right field. You'll have to try it out because it works funny with some pages.
  
• {SHIFTDOWN}{TAB}{SHIFTUP} will go backwards in a form! Useful for navigating to the submit button
• SHIFT-CTRL-TAB will go backwards through frames
  
• With username/password fields and mouse useage, it is best to either manually insert a long wait or click back and forth a couple of times. It is better just to activate the window and tab to the username field.
  
• Tab from the username to password field! Autocomplete will get in the way otherwise.
• Use subroutines to make things human readable. Gosub Label, Label: Return
  
• Once again, use the keyboard as much as possible!
• Use End to scroll to the bottom of a list. Note that in IE, if you are editing a form field, home and end go to the beginning and end of the field not the page.
  
• With popups, the recorder script waits for the background window to come back in focus after it asks the popup to close-- instead, explicitly wait for the popup window to close first, then activate the background window. Otherwise, sometimes it stalls...
• IE shorcuts: http://www.obs.org/cheatsheet/ieshortcut.htm