Dr Nic [Mon 25 Feb 2008, 11:51PM] said:

Is the gems' original src available on svn/git? Throwing it up on git (say github.com) might make it easier for ppl to write/share plugins.

A TextMate plugin would be nice for demoing TextMate bundles in action.

Dr Nic [Mon 25 Feb 2008, 11:55PM] said:

I assume there's more good stuff in the src since your rake tasks mention files in spec/* folder.

PROJ.specs = FileList['spec/*/_spec.rb']

Deploying all files with a gem is a Good Thing so that ppl can run the tests etc, I think.

Joseph [Tue 26 Feb 2008, 12:56AM] said:

Good point. The plan was to use rubyforge's svn, but you're right that decentralization of the source would suit this project. I've been meaning to try out gitorious, but will also look at github.

No specs, no tests. Feel free to contribute a patch containing whatever salves your conscience.

Dr Nic [Tue 26 Feb 2008, 10:25AM] said:

If you want a github invite, ping me. Forking is fun on github, imo.

Joseph [Tue 26 Feb 2008, 11:46AM] said:

Okay, the git repository is up at github:

http://github.com/joseph/castanaut/

Hack away. (Thanks Dr Nic!)

Marcos [Wed 27 Feb 2008, 12:21AM] said:

What are the odds of getting this to work with OS 10.4? It looks like most of the magic is translation ruby to AppleScript, which should work fine on the older OSes. It's files like cbin/osxautomation that I would assume are currently 10.5 only? I would love to lend a hand if you could help me get started on a patch.

Joseph [Wed 27 Feb 2008, 10:20AM] said:

There's a few factors at play here; let me think about it for a bit.

Marcos [Fri 29 Feb 2008, 2:21AM] said:

Actually, I've been working on adding a compatibility layer to Castanaut the past few days using the xtool scripting additions http://osaxen.com/files/xtool1.1.html It lets me implement basic mouse & keyboard control in Tiger. I've also considered using Extras Suite, though it has a registration fee. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16666

I'd love to get in contact with you to send you the work I've done so far & get some feedback.

Joseph [Fri 29 Feb 2008, 9:34AM] said:

Sure -- I'm interested to see how far you get with xtool. I can send you a Github invite for you to fork the repository if you like.

Marcos [Sat 1 Mar 2008, 8:34AM] said:

I'd be glad to, invite away. I needed a good reason to learn how to use Git anyway :-)

Marcos Kuhns [Wed 5 Mar 2008, 12:58PM] said:

FYI: I just committed.. er.. pushed the beginnings of my Mac OS 10.4 Compatibility release to Github

http://github.com/metavida/castanaut/

Give it a try on Leopard to make sure I didn't break anything.

Jason Huggins [Fri 7 Mar 2008, 8:04PM] said:

Castanaut is just brilliant stuff! I've been wanting to morph my project (Selenium) into something like this for a long time. Glad to see someone beat me to it! :-)

I'm interested in porting this to Ubuntu/Firefox...

On Linux, the text2speech can be done with Festival, the video recording with pyvnc2swf, the mouse and keyboard movements with xautomation, and element location in Firefox with MozRepl. Dogtail could be used for element location in other Gnome apps. It just. might. work. :-)

Joseph [Sat 8 Mar 2008, 4:49PM] said:

You read my mind, Jason. I'd got as far as xautomation on my Ubuntu box, and a patched (possibly bundled?) ffmpeg for recording, but not much further with the other aspects. My experiments with vnc2swf obtained very stuttery, noisy results, but maybe a better VNC server setup could have fixed this.

My intention was to turn Movie into an abstract class with platform subclasses (OSXMovie, LinuxMovie) and add a command-line option to force a particular platform.

But I'm open to suggestions. I'm not able to work on Castanaut for a fortnight, but if you want a github invite to fork the repo and try stuff out (as Marcos has), let me know.

By the way, Marcos: great to hear! As above, I can't to check it out for a while, but if anyone else can and wants to post their findings here, that'd be very helpful.

Marcos Kuhns [Tue 15 Apr 2008, 11:57AM] said:

I've continued to improve my fork of Castanaut, working to make a Linux (or Windows) compatible version as painless as possible to implement. Platform detection is automatic at this point, though a command-line option wouldn't be terribly hard to add.

Another added bonus is irb support so that you can run Castanaut commands interactively (especially useful with the cursor_position method).

Can't wait till you (Joseph) have some free time to give it a spin. In the meantime, if anyone else is up for working on a Linux port or doing more OS X Leopard testing with my fork that would be awesome. Drop me a line at webmaster at kuhnsfam dot com.

Joseph [Tue 15 Apr 2008, 10:37PM] said:

Marcos, this really looks sensational. Give me a few days to go over your code and test what I can under Tiger, then we should begin co-ordinating a 1.1 gem release.

Jason Huggins [Thu 17 Apr 2008, 6:23AM] said:

Just a quick update... I haven't worked on Castanaut directly lately, but I have been inspired to create something similar in Python. The big difference is that I set the whole thing up as an XML-RPC server... so I can "drive" the OS from a remote machine via an interactive Python session. Right now, I have it working for Windows XP, and I'm using pyvnc2swf to record/encode the movies and use various other Python libraries to control the mouse and keyboard. I can confirm that, yeah, vnc2swf does leave some "artifacts" in the movie... though it looks like with some tweaking of command line arguments, this can be mitigated. We'll see... Anyway, when I can, I'll roll this up into some public blog post I hope soon. :-)

Jason Lee [Tue 20 May 2008, 6:55AM] said:

It's a work-in-progress but my latest castanaut screencast can be found here..

http://big.first.name/home/screencast

A tiny fix for recording area resizing that was broken for me (and others?) is here...

http://github.com/jlsync/castanaut/commit/4b4c3aa6782fa6ad554d26bf297ac5f1adf5fd25

Also, the latest iShowU update seems to have helped with recording performance.

Bojan Mihelač [Mon 16 Jun 2008, 8:46PM] said:

Hello,

is it possible to use unicode with type method? osxautomation is binary file making I cant see whats going on in there....

thanks, Bojan Mihelac