"All the times I'd run into situations where the answer was essentially "nope, can't automate that" in the past were beyond infuriating." BTW: In the past (bec

"All the times I'd run into situations where the answer was essentially "nope, can't automate that" in the past were beyond infuriating." BTW: In the past (because I don't do a lot of this anymore either), GUI operations were automatable with one of the dozens of clones of the windows macro recorder. The ones I remember using had their own little scripting languages (which could be automatically generated/recorded) with simple variable substitution and control flows. The resulting scripts were callable from the command line/batch files. Those products overwhelmingly relied on the ability to walk the GUI resource trees and find things by id/name/some attribute and then send messages like clicking or typing to them. How well applications like this still work in a metro/modern environment I don't know. Although a google search indicates a number that are still available. BTW: For the linux/X users out there, check out http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee/ http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee/