AskUI Blog

Follow the AskUI blog for product news, feature announcements and technical posts about automation.

Five filled teabags in different shapes and sizes hanging in the air with their strings reaching outside the top of the image. The background is black and a title text Convenience Methods is in the foreground.

Better AskUI Workflows with Convenience Methods in AskUI SDK (ADK)

AskUI interacts with your operating system like a real human user. This directly leads to code that specifies WHAT you have to do in a specific sequence to achieve a workflow. Unfortunately this also means a lot of repetitive code. This is why we implemented some convenience methods to help you ease these pain points.

Johannes Dienst
March 13, 2024

Run AskUI Studio's Workflow on Your Local Windows Machine with Self-Hosted Runner

In this guide, we will walk you through the steps that you need for running an AskUI self-hosted runner on your local Windows machine. The AskUI self-hosted runner is a self-hosted component that downloads your workflows from AskUI Studio and runs them on the device it is hosted at. So this guide presumes that you already have an account for the AskUI Studio as well as know how to create a workflow in it.

Haram Choi
March 4, 2024
Left side AskUI logo with subtitle AskUI. Right side Playwright logo with title Playwright on the top. Background is left side teal colored right side is rose colored.

Use Playwright and AskUI Together

Playwright is the de facto standard when it comes to reliably testing browser applications across browsers and operating systems. But what if your workflow under test leaves your browser and requires you to automate on a desktop application? AskUI is not confined to a specific application because it uses visual selectors and real human-user-like input with keypresses and natural mouse movement. This makes it an ideal tool to accompany Playwright.

Johannes Dienst
April 8, 2024
Left side AskUI logo with subtitle AskUI. Right side Selenium logo with title Selenium on the top. Background is left side teal colored right side is rose colored.

Use Selenium and AskUI Together

When you automate browser applications there is no way around an automation tool as Selenium. It is optimized for browser interaction and executes blazingly fast. However sometimes you need to leave the confines of your browser to interact with another application or your operating system. This is not possible with Selenium alone.AskUI shines in this regard as it is not limited to a browser with its visual selectors and real input commands like keypresses and mouse movement.

Johannes Dienst
April 10, 2024

Upload PDF and Send E-Mail with AskUI Studio

In this part of the guide, we will use AskUI Studio to send an email with a PDF file attached. We will start with the condition where we already have a PDF file to send via email. In the example, we will use a gmail accout for the demonstration, but it would also work with any other email service.

Haram Choi
February 20, 2024
Background half pastel rose colored left and pastel green colored on right. In the middle cable overhead earphones in pastel green. On the left AskUI logo with subtitle AskUI. On the right Pipedream logo with subtitle Pipedream.

Run AskUI Workflows with Pipedream for Smoke Testing

This blog describes all the steps on how to integrate AskUI into a Pipedream workflow, so we get the benefit of visual selection and user interaction. We do this by implementing a smoke test for a login form.

Johannes Dienst
February 23, 2024
laptop, smartphone and newspaper, notes on the table

Download a Generated Printable PDF with AskUI Studio

This guide is designed to assist you to leverage our web-based automation environment, AskUI Studio. In particular, we will be focusing on generating a printable calendar, and downloading it in PDF from a dedicated website. By the end of this tutorial, you will be equipped with the basic knowledge to utilize AskUI Studio to interact with a website and handle pop-up dialogs for printing and downloading files.

Haram Choi
February 20, 2024
Tablet with diagram left. Clipboard with XRAY logo on the right. Apple keyboard top right. Title in the bottom reading JSON Report.

Create XRAY JSON Report And Upload it via API

When you use Jira as a testing team it is highly likely that you also use XRAY for testmanagement. So when you run UI-tests with AskUI you want to integrate the test run reports into xray automatically on each run. With the latest version of `askui-reporters` we added the `AskUIXRayStepReporter` that can create XRAY-proprietory-json reports, which offers step-level-reporting with screenshots!

Johannes Dienst
February 28, 2024
Cropped-out man with a glow effect around the outline. Title at the bottom: Automate Glow. Four green arrows pointing to the glow alongside the top.

Automate Glowing Outline Effect in Gimp with AskUI

AskUI shines when you realize a workflow has a complex click path and you want to automate it ad-hoc. This blog post shows you how you can automate a graphics effect I need for YouTube thumbnails: Outline the glow effect of a cropped-out person in Gimp!

Johannes Dienst
February 13, 2024