
Automagica: Open-Source Robotic Process Automation - mariushn
https://github.com/oakwoodai/automagica
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lifeisstillgood
This is a _huge_ area in enterprises right now - most large global businesses
have (I estimate) 2/3 of their headcount at serious threat to process
automation - and people are putting the money into it now - expect this area
to blow up in the next year or so - definitely a area for the sensible
contractor to look at.

However is _this_ automation package going to win? I don't know but OSS is
likely to have a big part to play

And as for the Windows only part - well 99.9% of the processes that are
currently done by humans and will get automated are done on windows machines
(cos if they were done by humans using a Linux box they would have already
built a shell script for it)

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ethbro
This appears to be a glorified services ad posing as an open source project.

The crux of desktop automation isn't that you can do the easy things, but that
you have a way of doing _everything_. A 99% automated process with one manual
step in the middle is still pretty useless.

Which is the reason the major vendors tend to have been in business for 10+
years. Because it's not about wrapping the Windows Active Accessibility API
(or whatever they're calling it now) and patting yourself on the back.

It's about supporting, out of the box, that VB6 app with a hacked-in async UI
interaction using a custom grid with a combo box in it.

And it's about exposing it in a way that, ideally, a business use familiar
with Visio-only can kludge together 85% of the logic.

In short, this looks like all those times HN opines on {biology / rocketry /
etc} and offers that "If they just ____, it would all be easy."

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cgio
Have you worked with major vendor solutions? They don’t do much more than
wrapping the accessibility api and in some cases clumsily so. They have
surface automation on top, but if you end up using it you are already in a bad
place automation wise.

~~~
ethbro
I've worked with all of the top 5 products in the space at various times. And
no, they don't.

Automation Anywhere is the least compatible of the bunch, and even it includes
custom translators.

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Fantastic5
I have used other (commercial) RPA vendors before, I do not understand why it
took so long for a Python RPA platform to be developped. The commercial
'graphical flows' are such bullshit. They claim to be business friendly so
that your average manager can use it to automate tasks, but in reality it
sucks and just creates vendor lock-in. Looks like Automagica still has some
work to do on the cross-platform area but at least it is nice to see Python
code based RPA.

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TFortunato
"Cross-platform" "Only supports Windows 10"

~~~
taneq
Relax. The actual quote from the readme is:

> Automagica officially supports Windows 10. Linux and MacOS are not
> officially supported.

It's cross platform, and Windows 10 is officially supported.

~~~
bdcravens
Looking in activities.py, I see a some functions that are OS-agnostic, but
also a ton of functions that are Windows-specific in terms of process names
and paths, and directly referencing the win32 lib. It's a matter of
"unsupported" meaning "impossible" rather than "you're on your own". That
said, the code is pretty easy to read, and would make for a good starting
point to make your own automation library.

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gapo
Very curious on the delta with AHK.

Their syntax looks a little bit more easier and the OCR Integration with
Tesseract looks nice. AHK however has way more examples.

~~~
nacs
AutoHotKey is Windows only and Automagica looks like it has crossplatform
support for one.

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ethbro
> "Our platform is built on open source technologies such as Python and
> Google’s Tensorflow, and is therefore easily extensible with the latest and
> greatest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence."

This... should definitely not be on your front page if you're trying to appear
like a serious desktop automation suite. Just, no.

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Penelopepe
I've used it for some small projects, I think their documentation is very
beginner friendly. Their cross-platform support isn't that great though, half
of their activities do not work on a Mac..

~~~
ponchodev
Cross-platform support wouldn't even be that hard to implement considering
Python is cross-platform already and there are quite a lot of automation
libraries for it.

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dalacv
sikuli ís nice

