JBidwatcher 2.1
A Java-based application allowing you to monitor auctions you're not
part of, submit bids, snipe (bid at the last moment), and otherwise
track your auction-site experience. It includes adult-auction
management, MANY currencies (pound, dollar (US, Canada, Australian,
and New Taiwanese) and euro, presently), drag-and-drop of auction URLs,
an original, unique and powerful 'multisniping' feature, a relatively
nice UI, and is known to work cleanly under Linux, Windows, Solaris,
and MacOSX from the same binary.
Please do not re-sell the JBidwatcher program or code.
JBidwatcher is under active development, and issues are reasonably quickly
responded to. Bug reports and feature requests are always welcome, as
are praise and complaints. Always feel free to
make suggestions
or
report bugs.
If you'd like to know a bit about some of the advanced configuration
settings that are not yet available from the configuration UI, you can look at my
guide to the configuration file format.
It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth
of tuning configuration parameters. A less descriptive listing of
the existing configuration values is on the
JBidwatcher development forum.
News Flash (October 1, 2011) —
JBidwatcher 2.1.6 has been released, resolving several eBay changes and bugs
It’s been a while since my last release, and eBay has made a few changes that caused searches and some other features to break. in the mean time I’ve been trying to add some small features and clean up the application some. 2.1.6 is the combination of these two things, along with a healthy amount of work in response to feedback during the long pre-release process. Best of luck with yourauctions!
User Visible
- Remove Mature Audiences from the eBay configuration display. It’s my #1 support problem for user having trouble logging in. It’s still accessible from the Advanced Configuration setting, as
‘ebay.mature’ (without the quotes), and it’s described in the FAQ.
- Fix a longstanding bug that you couldn’t really change username/password while running JBidwatcher; you had to shut it down and restart JBidwatcher. Now it takes effect immediately!
- Fix another longstanding bug where on a bid, JBidwatcher would forget who the seller was, replacing them with the high bidder’s id, and thus items would fall out of the selling tab.
- Some price detection improvements.
- Handle eBay’s new URL format.
- Don’t stomp on user-entered or previously-correctly detected shipping amounts.
- Sometimes updates would appear to stop, usually for newly added items, and items wouldn’t move to ‘complete’ after ending.
- Better handle the system tray on Windows with Java5.
- Drag an image onto a listing to replace its thumbnail with that image.
- Seller-ended auctions weren’t being recognized as ended.
Internals
- Hopefully improve sleep-detection and handling.
- Failing to load the tray.dll (as on Windows 7 64 bit) shouldn’t cause the program to fail to start up, and should fall back to Java6’s system tray code if possible.
- Lots of changes for debugging and testing.
- Improved scripting interface.
- Small improvements to thread safety.
- Lots of refactorings and cleanups.
JBidwatcher 2.x requires at least Java 1.5. This is available for
Windows and Linux across the board, but it means that OS X 10.4 or
later will be required for the Mac. I feel comfortable with two major
versions back (So OS X 10.4 through 10.6, Java 1.5 and 1.6), as it
combines the maximum number of people who will be able to use it, and
a relatively usable development environment.
Older News (April 10, 2011) —
JBidwatcher 2.1.5 is out, fixing international listings
eBay has been pretty active lately; this most recent breakage was just of non-US non-PayPal listings. I took the opportunity to address a few minor issues, while I’m looking into some longer-term problems. Best of luck with your auctions!
Fixes
- The non-US non-PayPal item issue
- ’Post to: ’ in location fields
- Failure to read feedback scores
Improvements
- Some attempts to improve data consistency
- Completed auction loading and ‘lost’ auction recovery don’t block each other
- Better messaging around the browse-to site and My JBidwatcher configurations
- Show the revision number on Windows and Linux
Written by: Morgan Schweers
Last modified: Fri Nov 18 19:38:40 PST 2011
