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April 21, 2008

Python Rosetta Stone Automation

Many, many months ago I had a long, long layover in the airport in Madrid. On the flight over from the States I had grown increasingly frustrated with the interface to "The Rosetta Stone" language learning software. Now I must confess, there actually is little to get wrong in this interface as the majority of the interaction with the software is done via clicking one of four buttons. However, I come from the UNIX world where I prefer everything to be able to be driven from a set of keyboard shortcuts and so I committed my layover to automating The Rosetta Stone.

Tonight I find myself writing from yet another long, long layover and I find myself revisiting The Rosetta Stone to brush up on my Spanish. I remembered my little application I wrote in Spain and so I made a few tweaks and decided to share it, just in case anybody should find it useful.

If anything, it demonstrates two concepts:

• The bizarre Windows goop one must wade through in order to automate a Windows application with no known automation interface.
• The power and expressiveness of well-abstracted code written in Python.

Here is the entire application. It is less than 50 meaningful lines of code:

import os
import sys
import time
from msvcrt import getch

sys.path.append("../win32automation")

import win32automation

os.system("title KeySetta")
win32automation.spawnProcess(
    r"C:\Program Files\The Rosetta Stone\The Rosetta Stone\TheRosettaStone.exe")
while 1:
    print "Waiting for application to start..."
    result = win32automation.windowFocus("The Rosetta Stone")
    if result:
        print "Window found!"
        break
    time.sleep(1.0)
print "Waiting 5 seconds for login screen to appear..."
time.sleep(5.0)
win32automation.sendKeys('jordanh{ENTER}')

print """
   Keyboard to Mouse Macros Enabled:

     - Answer selection:
       [7] [9]
       [1] [3]
       
    Please focus this window to enable them...
"""

coord_map = {"7": (180, 300),
             "9": (480, 300),
             "1": (180, 475),
             "3": (480, 475)}

while 1:
    win32automation.windowFocus("KeySetta")
    ch = getch()
    print "Last key pressed: %s\r" % (ch),
    if ch in ('1','3','7','9'):
        win32automation.windowFocus("The Rosetta Stone")
        x, y = coord_map[ch]
        win32automation.mouseMoveToRelative("The Rosetta Stone", x, y)
        win32automation.mouseClick(button="left")
    elif ch.lower() == 'q':
        print "Quitting!"
        break
    else:
        print "WARNING: Unknown key-macro event '%c'." % (ch)

sys.exit()

Granted the silly "win32automation" module I wrote is a little stupid. It is based on the excellent example provided over at http://del.icio.us/amoebapr/python. Notice for example none of the functions take an opaque handle to an object. Instead, all of the functions inside of the module require some sort of hint (such as a window title) in order to re-find the desired object before executing an operation on it.

Hopefully however sharing this code will spark somebody to develop a better, free Windows automation module for Python.

Download keysetta.zip (md5sum: a4336d883fcb10b11b8b660451e522a3)

Posted by jordanh at April 21, 2008 11:30 PM

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