What's new
In almost 6 years of continuous development we have achieved the solid performance of today versions. Our stress test regularly performs 1 million consecutive screen scrapings without any crash or degradation in the system performance. Learn more about screen scraping and its challenges here.
Please find below the latest latest versions release dates and notes for Studio.
Screen Scraper Studio 5.0 is out
Main features
Streamlined programming interfaces
We condensed the old functionality spread across a multitude of interfaces into a single and consistent new interface dubbed UiNode. Remember the TextCapture 15 interfaces? Enter the new single Scrape method. No worries, backward compatibility is completely preserved and old programming model can still be used.
Handling UI events
The most requested feature from our customers! Intercept mouse and keyboard actions on UI elements that match a specific Selector or anywhere on the screen. Best of all your code can be called before the event is sent to the target window so you can scrape it safely without the risk of the target windows being closed.
Image based automation
Automating an application running in virtual machine or delivered via remote desktop/Citrix Xen is a daunting task. We have added an image match algorithm that finds a screenshot on the live desktop in less than 100 milliseconds, everything exposed in an easy to use manner.
Browse UI of other apps
Cannot express how badly we needed ourselves to be able to explore the UI tree of other apps. UiExplorer is up to the task and as a bonus it lets you easily customize the Selector of an UI element.
Enhanced Selector
A lot of work has been expressly done in the field of creating a more reliable selector for Java, WPF and web apps.
6 new wizards and serious UX work on Studio
Studio evolved from a simple sample to a full featured code generation tool that really simplifies the development of apps or automation scripts. We polished every bit of it to perfection. We created new wizards to easily work with UI events and images and rework all the other wizards to ensure a click and code experience.
Improved OCR
You can now specify that the text to be scraped is Number, Date, Currency, Phone number and even more generally contains a specific set of characters greatly enhancing the OCR output.
Support for Google Chrome
Yes, screen scraping and UI automation in Chrome at html field level is available.
1-Click automation script deployment
Create an automation script and deploy on 100s PCs in minutes. Studio knows how to generate a single executable that install the run time on a target machine, copy the automation script and set a hotkey to run it.
New samples
All samples have been revisited and new ones have been added.
Simplified documentation
The new documentation is oriented to developer to get the job done. Starting an app and deployment sections have been revisited while the API reference is easy to explore.
Small enhancements & Bug fixing
More than a thousand small enhancements and resolved bugs have been logged in our tracking system to make up v5.
ScreenScraper Studio version 5.0.4392 Beta
- Image automation - find snapshots on the desktop
- UIExplorer - edit selector, select and explore the UI visual tree
- GUI Events - register for mouse and keyboard events on external controls
- Other bug fixes and improvements
For beta testing you can download Studio 5 Beta from our blog.
ScreenScraper Studio version 4.0.4335. Release date 11/14/2011
- Important change in supporting web pages;
- More attributes have been added;
- The selector is much more accurate.
ScreenScraper Studio version 4.0.4321. Release date: 10/31/2011
- Better selector generation (more control names)
- Fixed setup issues
- Error messages instead of error codes
ScreenScraper Studio version 4.0.1708. Release date: 10/7/2011
- Bug fix: Internet Explorer selection
- Bug fix: FindAll for Java
- Bug fix: VB.NET code generation
ScreenScraper Studio 4 is out! Release date: 9/26/2011. Additions.
Completely redesign Studio with an accent on usability
Better control on scraping methods
All scraping wizards have been changed to expose in a clean manner various scraping options.
New UI Automation wizards
Easily perform most common action on UI controls like clicking, typing text, selecting and checking them.
Improved code generators
Now all wizards offer the ability to generate code in the language of your choice.
OCR scraping improvements
New option to recognize numbers only as well as general accuracy improvements.
Improved automation on Winforms, WPF, Silverlight and Web app
All automation methods offered by UIElement now work transparently regardless of underlying technology.
Much better object recognition
UIElement selectors (or formerly known as IDs) now includes new attributes that makes them much more reliable and less dependent on indexes.
Control Timeout on Native scraping
Setting a longer timeout will allow you easily cope with systems where scraping takes longer than 2 secs that under stress.
Over 300 bugs fixed
This is a major version and we spent a great amount of time stabilizing it.
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.1.1590. Release date: 6/10/2011
- Feature: Java x64 support using the new Accessibility Bridge architecture.
- Bug fix: FullText space formatting issues
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.1.1580. Release date: 5/31/2011
- Bug fix: TCX::GetCaret
For .Net developers: ScreenScraper Studio on NuGet.
You can now find our screen scraper on NuGet, a Visual Studio extension that makes it easy to install and update open source libraries and tools in Visual Studio.
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.1.1548. Release date: 4/29/2011
- Feature integration IE9: Native method
- OCR correction
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.1.1464. Release date: 2/7/2011
- Bug fix: TSelection x64
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1107. Release date: 12/6/2010
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1104. Release date: 12/3/2010
- Bug fix: active window IE9
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1096. Release date: 11/29/2010
- Bug fix: error when retrieving the value of a tree item
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1089. Release date: 11/24/2010
- New method: GetActiveWindowHwnd3. Bug fix & improvement: Reg free com + fixes related to x64 screen scraping
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1003. Release date: 10/22/2010
- Bug fix: not showing the option to Download an OCR language file
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.1001. Release date: 10/21/2010
- Bug fix: code generator fixes better formatting, c++ & VB6 error treatment
ScreenScraper Studio version 3.0.0.965. Release date: 9/29/2010
- Bug fix: OCR not taking 1st space
Most important additions with ScreenScraper Studio and SDK 3.0
New user interface
Completely revamped user interface rethought from scratch with usability in mind.
OCR screen scraping
We took Google Tesseract engine and tweaked it to work with screen fonts. It works with scanned documents, images, remote desktop and anywhere else where the regular methods failed to extract text. Moreover we have created tools to train the OCR for specific fonts. Character recognition for trained fonts is about 99%.
UIElement
New component aiming to identifying user interface controls irrespective of their size and position by assigning them simple plain text monikers. Forget about scraping regions on the screen and go for predictably scraping logical user interface controls. Has also support for basic UI automation like clicking on controls or writing text to editable controls. Works with Win32, WinForms, Java, Flash, WPF, FoxPro, HTML apps.
TSelection
New component to offer programmatically support for selecting regions on the screen as well as windows and UI controls.
Improved java scraping
New controls like combo-boxes, tabs, tables are supported. Memory leaks eliminated and installing support improved.
Support Flash web pages
100% accuracy and extremely fast response time with flash apps. With the advent of flash technology even in enterprise space this was a feature requested ny many customers.
HTML support for IE
Works with the DOM exposed by Internet Explorer render to get the full text out of web apps. It is faster than what native engine does and can get the entire text (not only visible text) from scrolling pages or hidden elements.
Better x64 compatibility
Complete support for Vista/7 x64 OSes. All scraping methods work with x64 apps. Transparent access from your x32 app to scraping both x32/x64 apps - no special coding necessary. Same if your app is x64.
Faster FullText method
Typical response time has been reduced to less than 32 milliseconds.
