Screen Poking describes techniques that generate mouse and keyboard events to control PC applications through other means. You can generate these on a software level (see JavaRobots), or by connecting hardware that identifies itself to your computer as a mouse/keyboard, or by taking actual mice and keyboards apart and connecting them to your own custom electronics. One of the advantages of screen poking is that you don't have to have any kind of API or source code access to the application you want to control. Disadvantages: brittle, and semantics are not clear from your automation code itself.