The window synchronizer

The synchronizer sits in the manager under Automation. You mark one running profile as the master and one or more running profiles as targets.

You still do the work with your own hands, and the program only carries it into the other windows. You write nothing in advance, and nothing happens without you.

• Clicks

  The element you clicked with the left button, where the cursor landed in a field, and where inside the window you hit.

• Typing

  Every letter you typed, in a form field and in the box for the text of a post or message.

• Paste

  The text you pasted.

• Scrolling

  How far you scrolled with the wheel or a finger.

• Keys

  Enter, Tab, Backspace, Delete, Escape, the arrows, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, keys pressed outside a field, and Cmd or Ctrl with A and Z.

• Address changes

  An address you typed, and a step back or forward. A target follows a link with its own click.

The app takes your actions from inside the leading page itself, not by reading your mouse at the level of the operating system. A helper records them in its own separate world of the page: it has its own names and its own listeners, and the page's own code does not see them.

It listens only in the leading window, so an ordinary window stays untouched. The app collects what has piled up every 40 ms on both engines, and when you stop, the helper removes its listeners at once.

Your click travels as more than a pixel. With it goes the element you hit, and where inside the window you clicked, kept as two fractions.

A field travels as letters, not as a finished value: the target types them itself, with keys, at its own pace. A scroll leaves as a distance, and a key by its name.

Each target window looks for the same element first, turns the wheel until it is in view and moves the mouse to it, and only then clicks. This is the road that survives a window of another size or a page that has shifted under a banner.

If the element is not found, the fractions take over, resolved against that window's own width and height. A profile dressed as a phone sends a press as a touch and a scroll as a swipe, because a real phone sends no mouse events at all.

Before each action a target waits its own pause, from 100 to 600 ms, different for every window. Several windows doing the same thing in the same millisecond tie the profiles together on their own.

A profile often has several tabs: the ARMANOS start page, the address you asked for and the tabs left open last time. ARMANOS Browser reopens those when its On startup setting is Continue where you left off, as it is in a new profile. On ARMANOS Browser the leading tab is the one you are looking at, and the app learns which that is from the pages themselves.

1. 1

   The tab on screen leads

   When the master has several tabs, the app asks them which one is on screen, and the first to answer leads. Otherwise a tab of the profile other than the start page leads.

2. 2

   Every target has its own answer

   A target with no page to answer drops out before the session starts, and if none are left the start refuses and says so.

3. 3

   The leading window is ready

   If the leading window cannot be prepared the session does not begin, because a half started session would look active and mirror nothing.

4. 4

   You see the count

   The status bar shows how many windows are following and lowers the count as target windows close.

The app picks the tabs once, when you press start, and keeps that choice for the master and for every target. Otherwise half your work would scatter into another tab.

A typed address and steps back or forward travel in the same queue as the actions, after them. A link or a submitted form the target repeats with its own click and does not load the same page a second time. Blank pages, error pages and developer addresses never reach the targets.

Mirroring is only useful if you can watch the result, so the manager can arrange every open window into a grid. It builds that grid on the display your cursor is on, inside its work area.

The app takes the square root of the window count rounded up for the columns and leaves six points between cells. If a cell would come out smaller than 420 by 320, it refuses and says why instead of laying out windows nobody can read.

Windows of both engines share that one grid, so they never land on top of each other. It skips a profile started without a window, and remembers the new place against that profile for the next launch.

The synchronizer is for work you are doing anyway, once, with your eyes on it: the same cookie banner in eight accounts, the same form, the same checkout to the same step.

A flow is for work you will do again. It costs more to write and far less to repeat.

A rule of thumb that holds up: more than twice, write a flow; once across five accounts, lead a window.

• The same pass, a few accounts, now

  The synchronizer. Nothing to write beforehand and nothing left behind.

• The same pass, many accounts, again

  A flow, with variables and a schedule.

• Different work in each account

  Neither one. Open the profiles and work in them separately.