What's new
Changes that alter what you can build or how an existing flow behaves. Fixes with no visible effect are left out.
The app tells you when a newer build is available and installs it from the banner; Download always serves the current one.
1.9 โ Desktop Modeโ
The release that stopped Microbe Studio being emulator-only. A flow can now drive the Windows applications of your own PC, with the same editor, nodes, queue and scheduler. Start at Desktop Mode.
Two workspaces, not one screen with a filterโ
Settings โ Runtime Environment switches between MuMu Emulator and Desktop, and switching replaces the whole shell: dashboard, flow list, queue and scheduler all show that environment only. Nothing of the other one is touched, and switching back restores it exactly.
Queue entries and schedules each remember which workspace they belong to, so a desktop routine and an emulator routine can sit on the same machine without ever meeting.
Every node says what it acts onโ
A desktop has many windows, so "the screen" is not an answer. Each acting or reading node now carries an Execution Context: Active Window, Specific Window, Entire Desktop, Monitor, or a Region anchored to one of them.
It is per node on purpose โ real desktop work reads a value from one window and types it into another. A window is stored as a description (process, title fragment, class, alias), never as a handle, so a flow survives the application restarting. A description that fits more than one window is refused at run time rather than guessed; Test Match in the window picker tells you the count before you save.
Open Appโ
A new Action node. It checks whether the window your flow needs already exists and only launches the program if it does not โ so the same flow works on a cold start and a warm one, and a second run does not open a second copy. It waits for the window to be in front, not merely open, and starts the program in its own folder. See Open App.
Authoring against what the flow will actually readโ
Live Preview takes the same five targets the nodes do. Choose source offers Entire Desktop, Monitor (when you have more than one) and Application Window โ so a flow that acts on the whole screen is drawn on the whole screen, in the coordinate space the run will use.
Test Node works on desktop flows, binding that node's own Execution Context and restoring the authored window shape exactly as a run does. Checking one Click no longer means running the whole flow.
Microbe Studio also excludes its own windows from every capture it takes, so a template cropped while the editor sits over the area gets what is behind it.
While a flow drives your machineโ
Because a desktop run moves your real mouse and keyboard, the product never hides that it is happening:
- An overlay shows the run's state and is click-through while the flow is driving, so it can never swallow a click or steal focus. Its button reads Stop while running and Dismiss once the run is over.
- Moving the mouse or typing pauses the run at the next node boundary. Every timeout and deadline freezes while paused.
- Ctrl+Alt+S pauses and Ctrl+Alt+R resumes from any window, and resuming counts down three seconds before input starts again.
- A paused scheduled run stops cleanly after a configurable number of minutes; set 0 to wait indefinitely.
Desktop-specific node behaviourโ
| Node | On a desktop flow |
|---|---|
| Key Press | Can hold Ctrl / Alt / Shift / Win, so Ctrl+S or Win+D is one node |
| Input Text | Types full Unicode regardless of keyboard layout; Clear before input is Ctrl+A then Delete rather than a bounded backspace burst |
| Zoom | Not offered โ a window has no pinch gesture |
Before acting, a run restores the target window to the shape the flow was drawn on and re-measures. If the application refuses that size the run is refused with both numbers, because succeeding at the wrong coordinates is worse than not running.
New error codesโ
APP_LAUNCH_FAILED, WINDOW_NOT_FOUND, WINDOW_AMBIGUOUS, TARGET_SURFACE_UNAVAILABLE, TARGET_CONTEXT_INVALID โ each with its own fix, listed in Error codes.
Licensingโ
Desktop Mode is the Windows Mode capability of a License Package. Without it the app says so and stays in Emulator mode. Flows published to the store are labelled with the mode they target, read from the uploaded package itself, so a buyer knows before paying.
A new OCR engineโ
Read Text moved off Tesseract to a bundled multilingual model. What changes for you:
- No language packs. One model ships inside the app and every language in the picker works on every build.
- Multi-line regions are read line by line โ the node finds where the ink stops, reads each band, and joins with a space. Nothing to configure.
- Reads are faster and more accurate on the same pixels.
One honest limitation: the model's character set is missing most Vietnamese tone-marked letters, so exact reads of accented Vietnamese are unreliable. Prefer the Number / Counter / Time / Percentage types, or anchor logic on digits.
Share Imageโ
A detection node inside a Monitor Scope can hand the exact frame it captured to nodes of the flow that scope watches. The monitor then checks once per shared frame instead of on its own timer โ so the watch analyses the same pixels the main flow just acted on, and its cost tracks the flow instead of a fixed interval.
The publisher picks the receivers; the receiving node configures nothing. Two validation warnings catch the wiring mistakes: SHARE_TARGET_NOT_MONITORED and MONITOR_NOT_SHARE_FED.
Editor and runtimeโ
- Validation takes you to the node that is wrong โ a message is a link, not a description.
- Groups and Comments collapse, and revealing a node travels to it rather than teleporting.
- Monitor Scope: the purple frame is the scope โ membership is geometric, so moving a node in or out is a drag. Per-activation and run-total counters are visible in the Runtime tab, and the per-flow monitor cap is gone.
- Swipe can bring a target to the centre without you doing the arithmetic.
- Find Image matches only the templates a node actually needs.
- Read Text: a single region can name and default its outputs, the way multi-region reads already could.
- Expressions gained
random(low, high), so a flow can vary its own caps. - Scheduler items can be reordered and collapse to a list.
- The update banner's Download button installs the new version rather than just fetching it.
Retiredโ
Parallel is gone from the toolbox. It never made anything concurrent โ parallelism in this product means more instances, each with its own queue. Flows still carrying it keep working; replace it with a Monitor Scope. See Legacy Nodes.