Latest News & How To Guides

Easier screen macro recording in PTFB Pro v4.6.0.0

– June 17, 2013Posted in: News

Version 4.6 of PTFB Pro – now available from our Download page – adds a few handy tweaks requested by our customers:

  • Immediately prior to recording screen-based macro, PTFB Pro quickly and discretely restores the previous foreground window. This is particularly useful if you want to record a macro for typing text into whatever happens to be the currently active program.
  • The “Fire only if window belongs to program” field is now editable. This optional field is present on the “Identifying the Target” page of several PTFB Pro item types; it constrains the item to acting only windows that belong to the nominated program.
  • PTFB Pro now recognizes some new target types in Internet Explorer v10

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False positives!

– March 27, 2013Posted in: How to eliminate Workflow Interruptions

As a couple of customers have noted, a recent release of virus definitions for Symantec’s antivirus offerings has generated a false positive for version 4.5.2 of PTFB Pro’s installation package. We’ve reported this to Symantec and they’ve replied, say that they’ll be including a fix in their next release of virus definitions. In the meantime, we’ve put up a new release of PTFB Pro, v4.5.4.0.

The only difference between this release and 4.5.2 is that it has a newer version of the installer engine we use. This change is apparently enough to avoid the false positive from the faulty virus definitions, but if you’re already running 4.5.2 there’s no need to upgrade.

So to sum up: the original 4.5.2 release is virus free, as Symantec’s virus definition update will soon confirm, but if you prefer not to wait for that you can grab v4.5.4.0 from our site which gets a clean bill of health even with the faulty virus definitions.

For more details about false positives please check out at this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software, specifically the section titled “Problems caused by false positives”. It contains a potted history of some of the costlier mistakes by anti-virus products thus far.

PTFB Pro and high DPI on Windows 8, 7 and Vista

– November 2, 2012Posted in: News

It’s becoming increasingly common for people to use the font and user-interface scaling option built into Windows 7 & 8 to make everything more readable. This scaling is also known as “high dpi” or “high dots per inch” mode, but whatever you want to call it, it’s a boon if you have a high resolution monitor that makes everything on screen seem uncomfortably small, or if your vision is less than perfect. PTFB Pro has now been updated specifically for high DPI systems to make sure that it looks it best and keeps on pressing the right buttons.

If you’re running a version of PTFB Pro prior to v4.5.1.0 and are using or intend to use high DPI mode, please stop by our download page and grab the latest release. If you want to know more about high DPI mode, including a little tip on how to get older programs play well with it, please take a look at the following article in PTFB Pro’s Help Desk:

http://www.tlhouse.co.uk/supportv4/index.php?/ptfb/Knowledgebase/Article/View/66/0/ptfb-pro-and-high-dpi-on-windows-8-7-and-vista

Finally, please note that our first release with the high DPI changes – version 4.5.0.0 – had a bug in it that resulted in messed up graphics and crashes on some systems. That release was only out for a few days before we fixed it, but if you do have v4.5.0.0, please update to v4.5.1.0 (or later) as soon as possible.

 

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