Program Overview

nnCron is an advanced and very powerful scheduler, scripting tool and automation manager. It will be useful to anyone seeking to automate most of his routine computer-related tasks.

Though nnCron is small in size, its capabilities are truly colossal. Besides possessing the conventional scheduler features (starting programs, displaying reminder messages and opening documents at specified time), nnCron also can:

• start any program as a service
• run tasks as if they were started by specified user
• handle and restart so called missed tasks and reminders
• shut down and hibernate the computer or put it into sleep mode at specified time
• "wake up" the computer in order to run a task
• display, hide, close, kill, minimize, maximize and hide specified windows to system tray
• display messages on screen and write them in a log file
• work with clipboard, files and registry
• emulate keyboard input and mouse activities
• dial and hang up
• use the system speaker to make beeps of specified length and frequency
• play audio files
• sync system time
• assign specified priority to a process
• terminate any running process
• restart automatically after fatal errors
• keep track of files, flags, windows, processes, mouse activities, periods of idle time, keyboard shortcuts, getting online/off line, insertion of disk in a drive, presence of a host in network (ping), amount of free space on a disk, etc., etc.

nnCron allows to use VBScript/JScript scripting languages, as well as regular expressions when defining a task. It can execute programs written in Forth language (SP-Forth), it can be extended with plug-ins etc...

nnCron understands cron table format (Unix) and is managed with easy-to-edit plain text crontab files. There are at least two reasons why it is convenient to keep settings and data in text files:

• they are easy to edit
• settings and tasks won't be lost in case of emergency re-installation of the OS or nnCron

However, for those who prefer to work in a GUI environment, the program has a graphical shell which can be used to remove, add, edit and run tasks, set up reminders, change program settings. Furthermore, nnCron possesses advanced capabilities for working with command line arguments.

nnCron can be run as a system service or as a regular application. As nnCron has to execute important and even critical system tasks, it contains a special tool to ensure a higher level of viability, so called "crash guard" mode.

nnCron has several additional built-in tools which extend its capabilities even further:

• WinSpy: a utility which permits to find out the current coordinates of mouse pointer, to establish the class of the object over which the mouse pointer hovers at the moment, to get information about coordinates of main window and child window.
• Console: a tool for interaction with nnCron for those who know Forth language, and an indispensable assistant for those who just start learning this language. You can use Console to administrate nnCron remotely.

Works under Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP. Not resource-demanding.