JBidwatcher 2.5
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It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth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 (March 18, 2012) —
JBidwatcher bumps up to 2.5, adds a first pass at scripting!
eBay related changes
- Better handle inter-country bidding failures, and some odd eBay interstitial pages
- Removed Dutch Auction support, since eBay doesn’t support that listing type anymore
- A ton of eBay-driven changes for new page formats, different bidding forms, and more.
- Better image/thumbnail retrieval, and price detection
- Improve BIN detection on fixed-price items you’ve already bought one of, multi-purchase buys, and underbid recognition.
- Fixed some snipe failures that were due to misinterpreting eBay’s broken HTML.
- Better ended-listing recognition
UI changes
- Add a ‘+’ tab for creating new tabs, to make it easier and more obvious
- Tweaked some minor UI inconsistencies
- Items move to their correct category after the fact, which looks a little odd, but means that items should end up in their appropriate categories without human intervention.
- Empty tabs have a little graphic in the middle; this will eventually get swapped out for some basic instructions, to make first-launch ramp-up time quicker.
- A bunch of (hopefully) improvements to the ‘first-run’ experience, including a simplified configuration screen.
- The ‘new update’ dialog got a makeover.
- Increased the default sizes on some dialogs, as monitor sizes have grown over the years
- Improve the thumbnail shown in ‘Show Info’.
- Focus should work better in all dialogs.
Internal fixes
- Fixed some My JBidwatcher setup/configuration issues
- Improved response to waking from sleep
- Internal improvements, reducing exceptions and deadlocks.
- Improve performance
- Some data-logging improvements
- Preserve some snipe information after a snipe has completed.
- Signing Mac binaries so JBidwatcher doesn’t get locked out by Mountain Lion
New features
- First pass at a multicast DNS service for wireless synch
- A purely opt-in metrics/analytics system so I can learn how folks use JBidwatcher in the wild.
- Brought back the scripting framework; JBidwatcher can now be scripted in JRuby
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 (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.
Written by: Morgan Schweers
Last modified: Fri Nov 18 19:38:40 PST 2011
