Introducing: Autotool

A new open-source gradual automation app

EDIT: Autotool has since been renamed to Slogidex and moved to https://github.com/aklos/slogidex. It’s a bit of an experiment, and maybe it’ll be useful for someone.

Autotool is a native desktop app I’ve been working on that helps you formalize and automate processes that give you trouble in terms of toil, difficulty remembering steps, or dealing with workflows someone else has created.

It’s open-source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/aklos/autotool

Gradual automation

We all have processes and workflows that we’d rather not trudge through. Sometimes we think of ways we can automate them, but it’s usually too much work upfront or we forget how to even run the automation we created later. Autotool was developed to help organize those workflows and automations, so that you never lose them and you can improve them over time.

It’s heavily inspired by an article published a few years ago called “Do-nothing scripting” - read it to get a deeper understanding of the problem space and proposed solution.

Autotool is actually not an implementation of do-nothing scripting specifically, but enables it if that's what you want to do, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while.

The current iteration takes a lot of cues from Jupyter Notebooks and Google Colab, where the concept of an editable and interactive document with minimalistic UI gels really well with the process of trying to formulate and understand a workflow. This just leaves the Python/remote environment and goes for shell access, while also implementing features specifically geared towards document management, step-by-step workflows, and data validation.

Why is it free?

I tried to make this a web service last year (the terribly named "Taskineer") but web has so many limitations in terms of security and flexibility that I realized the only way to create this is to make it a desktop app.

Due to the complexity of the whole thing, I think it's unrealistic for a solo developer to deliver a ship-able proprietary product out of it without hiding in a corner with a laptop for multiple years. I also figured that if this is such a great idea then a larger company with a proper team will just hijack it anyway.

So, I made it open source with some proprietary features planned in the future, aimed for intranet collaboration within larger companies. That way anyone who finds this useful can have it and contribute to the project to make it the best it can be, and maybe I'll be able to make some money off of the fumes.

Yet another process automation tool

There are plenty of process management and automation platforms available, like Process Street, or Processly, or Camunda, or ProcessMaker.

Besides their names, the problem with them is that they’re entirely geared towards enterprise workflows, they require payment, and they require platform buy-in with their proprietary tooling solutions.

Autotool is for anyone trying to automate annoying workflows, and aims to make your workflows as portable as possible: Define and run Bash, Powershell, AppleScript, ZSH, etc. scripts directly through the app on your own system. Later, you can export those scripts and use them somewhere else.

Built with Tauri

Tauri is a framework for developing Rust applications with web UIs.

Autotool makes use of Tauri to create a Rust backend for native system access, and a WebView frontend for great UI/UX flexibility. Autotool is 90% UX so that's important to me.

The fact that I can use React and Tailwindcss in my native application is pretty awesome. Having secure access to the user’s system at the same time? Powerful.

Now in Beta

Right now, Autotool is definitely in very early beta, so currently it's only available for MacOS and Linux, there are many features missing, and I'm sure there are a lot of bugs/issues - but hopefully this version gets the idea across and is useful for someone.

Try it out for yourself: https://github.com/aklos/autotool

Thanks!