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JBidwatcher, reviewed in the November 2004 MacWorld, has received a 4 mouse product rating from the Macintosh experts at Macworld.
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JBidwatcher, reviewed in the November 2004 MacWorld, has received a 4 mouse product rating from the Macintosh experts at Macworld.Thank you MacWorld!
JBidwatcher: eBay sniping, bidding & monitoring software.
10-May-2008 1:45pm PDT —
Due to the birth of my first child, JBidwatcher development is on hold for a few weeks.
1-May-2008 10:50pm PDT —
JBidwatcher 2.0's second public beta (2.0beta3) is available.
JBidwatcher Project Purpose
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.
It 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 It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth of tuning configuration parameters.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 (May 1, 2008) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 3 now available!
JBidwatcher 2.0 has reached a reasonably stable plateau, thanks entirely to the great alpha and beta testers who have been bashing on it and filing bugs. It's not done yet, and I'm abusing 'beta' like everyone else in the Web 2.0 world, but I think it's about time everybody got their hands on JBidwatcher 2.0.Like the previous beta, this release is a bit interesting...this one because it's being hurried slightly by events.
This version, over the previous beta, has had a lot of basic changes. I've messed with the database infrastructure a lot, trying to remove problems that some folks have had with auctions disappearing on them. My latest tests show that items shouldn't go away between sessions unless you force-quit/kill/end-task JBidwatcher unexpectedly. And in those cases, it should still be pretty solid.
I also lowered the memory usage a little, made Dutch auctions recognized again, made the included scripting support optional, fixed some of the persistent 'My eBay' not working issues, and made Location recognize non-USASCII characters. There are many open bugs left for me to work on.
Also, I have not solved the persistent problem of failing to launch on some users OS X 10.5.2 systems. I really don't know what's going on, and I would love any hints that anybody has. One person has suggested that a workaround might be to try and run the .jar file (the Linux version). If the app bundle doesn't run for you, and you try the .jar, please share your results on the forums so others can know.
I'm making the standard download version the 2.0 beta 3 now, because I believe it's good enough for general use. There are still bugs, so please report them when you run across them. I'm tracking issues via Lighthouse for the 2.0 version.
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 and 10.5, 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.
More information is available at the JBidwatcher 2.0beta2 changelog (soon to be updated to the beta3 changelog).
- Mac OS X users can download an app.tar.gz.
Download (it'll automatically decompress) and double-click the .tar file to extract the Application! - For the first time, Windows users can download a Windows installer! The standard 'download and run' executable is still available, of course.
- You can also download the Java binary for any other platform, including Linux and Solaris.
Launch with:java -Xmx512m -jar JBidwatcher-2.0beta3.jar
Best of luck with your auctions!
— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!
News Flash (April 27, 2008) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 open beta now available!
JBidwatcher 2.0 has reached a reasonably stable plateau, thanks entirely to the great alpha and beta testers who have been bashing on it and filing bugs. It's not done yet, and I'm abusing 'beta' like everyone else in the Web 2.0 world, but I think it's about time everybody got their hands on JBidwatcher 2.0.The release process for this was particularly 'interesting', because a show-stopper slipped past me, was caught in the nick of time, and while I was trying to fix it, my monitor died and I had to go run out and get a new, crappy one, so I could finish up.
There are a lot of features that have gone into this version, but most of them are under the covers. A substantial refactoring of the code has allowed me to add several major features and fix the behavior in many places. The changes include scripting, a good database underneath, better memory usage, a few new UI features (including a thumbnail view!), recognition of wake-from-sleep, better date and end-of-auction recognition.
Once again, I'd like to expressly thank Laurence Passmore, who filed many bug reports, and provided several great patches for this latest version. His interest in making it work right was a catalyst for getting me to focus on releasing the JBidwatcher 2.0 beta before my first kid comes. :) Especially because in the last few moments before I was about to release the 2.0 beta publicly, he found a critical bug that would have failed entirely for new users. There are bugs remaining, and they're all my fault. :) The public beta is to hash that stuff out.
I'm making the standard download version the 2.0 beta now, because I believe it's good enough for general use. There are still bugs, so please report them when you run across them. I'm tracking issues via Lighthouse for the 2.0 version.
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 and 10.5, 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.
More information is available at the JBidwatcher 2.0beta2 changelog.
- Mac OS X users can download an app.tar.gz.
Download (it'll automatically decompress) and double-click the .tar file to extract the Application! - For the first time, Windows users can download a Windows installer! The standard 'download and run' executable is still available, of course.
- You can also download the Java binary for any other platform, including Linux and Solaris.
Launch with:java -Xmx512m -jar JBidwatcher-2.0beta2.jar
I still strongly recommend backing up your JBidwatcher data directory before installing the beta. However, the beta should mostly leave your saved auction files alone.
The final version is intended to upgrade the 1.x data directories cleanly (and if the betas don't, that's something that definitely needs to be reported!), but if you have an earlier alpha/beta of 2.0, it may not upgrade quite as data cleanly. (It should, but it's a lower priority bug for me.)
So if you're interested in trying the new code, make a backup of your JBidwatcher data first, so you can restore it before running the final version.
JBidwatcher's source code is available and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, and can be tracked via git or subversion. The only exception to the license is the new icons. Those are commercial icons, which I bought for JBidwatcher 2.0.
Older News (August 11, 2007) -- JBidwatcher 1.0.2 is released.
This version fixes the multiple breakages eBay introduced over the last few weeks, including changing the title format, removing (then adding back) the end date, and start date, many changes to different listing types, the change of the official time server URL, underbid page recognition, lots of bugfixes and features by Laurence Passmore (especially in the currency realm). Also added is a File menu option to clear Deleted entry tracking, which has been responsible for memory issues for some users. Moved 'Bid' away from 'Snipe' in the context menu, to reduce errors. A minor improvement in performance (auctions should update faster). Some issues when the seller moves the end date and a snipe was pending have been fixed, as well. Lots of behind-the-scenes fixes for consistency and better behavior. OSX Shutdown shouldn't be cancelled anymore if you don't have any snipes outstanding, or you've told it not to warn you on close.Whew. It's been a rough few weeks, and if I was brusque with anyone during that time, I apologize. There were a lot of changes, one after the other.
I honestly couldn't have gotten through the last three weeks of JBidwatcher issues without the incredible help of everyone on the JBidwatcher Forums.
I'd like to especially call out Laurence Passmore who supplied many patches, and helped talk through a bunch of fixes and features, and was tireless in helping folks on the forums! Also, Hans who was the first-responder, and got a patched version to folks before I even woke up the morning it broke. Stefan W and Charles M. both provided me with their auction information, to help resolve a key error that happened during saving. There were many others, and everybody helped out during this unpleasant time. I'm really, really happy to see that, and I hope the new forums helped make it a bit easier.
More information is available at the JBidwatcher 1.0.2 changelog. (Not written yet; sometime Saturday...)
- Mac OS X users can download an app.tar.gz.
Download (it'll automatically decompress) and double-click the .tar file to extract the Application! - Windows users can download a Windows executable!
- You can also download the Java binary for any other platform, including Linux and Solaris.
Launch with:java -Xmx512m -jar JBidWatcher-1.0.2.jar - As always, you can download the source and build it for yourself.
Technical Attributes
Unlike other bid management software, it is EXTREMELY flexible in its formatting, which has let it survive with virtually no changes to the core web-page extraction code over the last seven years of eBay's constant fluctuation of formatting. One more small change was necessary to support the eBay Stores items, since they don't have any start dates, or number of bids. In general though, these were all very easy changes because of the structure of the program.
The Java code is also a reasonably good example of abstracted design and object oriented principles, pattern use, and has surprised even me with the amount of reusability and flexibility in it.
JBidwatcher uses a clean (custom Properties based) text format for its configuration files, has its own HTTP class, an HTML parser, and configuration class, all released under the LGPL. It also stores its save-files in XML, using a very customized fork of the NanoXML parser which is NOT LGPL'ed. That library uses the zlib/libpng license.
I'm also using a customized variant of the BrowserLauncher Java class, customized to use JRE1.4's Windows Registry access functions (if available!) to discover the default browser on Windows. It's also customized so that the user can override its 'decision' for the Unix platform, and Windows if the registry functions aren't available. It uses Reflection so that it works without issues on any supported JRE (1.2.2 and later).
Written by: Morgan Schweers