Current Stable Version

• February 23, 2009
  JBidwatcher 2.0.1

Current Edge Version

• January 3, 2010
  JBidwatcher 2.1pre5

Downloads (Edge)

• OS X Disk image
• OS X app.tar.gz
• Linux Binary
• Windows standalone
• Source (license)

Search the JBidwatcher site:

Documentation

• JBidwatcher FAQ
• 2.1pre5 Release Notes
• Quick Start Guide
• Multisniping Details
• License Summary
• Advanced Config (old)
• Screenshots
• My Dev Setup

Bug & Feature Tracking
Developers Blog

Older News


JBidwatcher, reviewed in the November 2004 MacWorld, has received a 4 mouse product rating from the Macintosh experts at Macworld.
Thank you MacWorld!

Quick Download
Windows Standalone
2.1pre5

Quick Download
Mac OS X Disk Image
2.1pre5

Quick Download
Linux
2.1pre5

Latest News Flash (03-Jan-2010 03:04am PST)
03-Jan-2010 03:09am PST —
23-Feb-2009 08:54am PST —
14-Feb-2009 8:10pm PST —

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.

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 It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth of tuning configuration parameters.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.

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News Flash (January 3, 2010) — JBidwatcher 2.1pre5 is out for general consumption!

There’s a lot of changes bundled into this version. The highlights since 2.1pre4 are:

• Lots of eBay fixes
  • Multiple high bidder and fixed price problems have been resolved
  • My eBay searches should work a little better
  • Seller feedback and names should be loaded
• Many, many small UI fixes
  • Improved layout and UI, especially on Mac OS X and under the Thumbnail mode
  • The long-standing issue with shrinking the toolbar and overlapping the status/select box has been fixed.
  • Show Information and Set Shipping dialogs don’t break with large images or many status updates
  • Nasty Java 1.6 bug that prevents multi-select and context-menu usage has been worked around.
• Several Mac OS X-specific fixes and features
• Reduced the My JBidwatcher usage, improving synchronization
• Transitioned to git as the version control software.

For a little more detail see the changelog.

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.

• 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.
  I'm also trying to provide a Mac OS X .dmg
• Windows users can download the standard 'download and run' executable for now, and an installer version will be coming.
• You can also download the Java binary for any other platform, including Linux and Solaris.
  Launch with:
  java -Xmx512m -jar JBidwatcher-2.1pre5.jar

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Older News (February 22, 2009) — JBidwatcher 2.0.1 is available!

Fixes include (in the order they got fixed):

• If the toolbar is hidden on startup, on platforms that support it, show the login status in the menu bar.
• Eliminate ‘phantom’ auctions, where it claims it’s in the list, but you can’t find it
• Some listings which got completely ‘lost’, are now found
• When debugging is enabled at startup, substantially deeper database debug logging is kept
• Snipes status should now be accurately visible in the UI
• If you change passwords or usernames, snipes can now be successfully cancelled and set during that same session
• Fix the freeze-on-startup with maxxed CPU problem; mainly happened with very large auction databases
• Recognize infinite redirects during ‘test login’ as most likely being captcha interference
• Add a ‘License Details’ Help menu entry, so folks know what the license for JBidwatcher is
• Finally fix the icon paths in the ‘Colors and Icons’ Help page
• Add a ‘just to be sure’ update at 30 seconds after the end of a sniped auction

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Older News (February 13, 2009) — JBidwatcher 2.0 is released!

Fixes include (in no particular order):

• Bidding on items that are only visible on the non-US eBay sites should be more consistent (the error manifested as getting an error page which appears to be another login page)
• Snipes placed or cancelled through the web interface show up in the main UI
• Finally resolving a nagging problem with display configurations not being saved between sessions
• Multisnipes not firing, or seeing ‘unsafe multisnipes’ when there aren’t
• Duplicate entries in the display should finally be eliminated
• Auctions that end, or whose bid amount changes, should also consistently reflect the latest state that JBidwatcher knows
• The .dmg for Mac users should have a link to the Applications folder, for easy drag-and-drop installation
• Large deletes should be possible again (the delete happens in the background)
• Better handling of eBay’s bad HTML
• Multiple currencies are allowed in multisnipes (although it’s a bad practice, and you’re warned against it!)
• Double-click in the open space (where listings aren’t) will clear the selection
• —usb on the command line should work better now
• eBay’s habit of sending 404’s for perfectly valid auctions has been partially worked around
• Only active listings are loaded during start up, everything else (completed listings) gets loaded later, in the background
• The Mature Audiences checkbox is now clearer about its use (and should not be used by non-US users; it will break logging into eBay)
• The default browser on Linux is now ‘firefox’
• Under Mac OS X the JBidWatch.cfg file should be stored with the rest of JBidwatcher’s files now

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Older News (January 15, 2009) — JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 11 has been made available!

This is a critical release for anyone using multisniping; sometimes JBidwatcher will fail to associate multisnipes correctly on restart. When that happens and one auction is won in the multisnipe group, it fails to cancel the other items. That means that it may continue to bid on later items in a multisnipe group, even though it’s won an earlier item. This is a really serious bug, one of the worst that JBidwatcher can have, and I feel sick at what it could do to folks. Please upgrade.

This version contains only a fix for that problem, and a minor fix for a problem writing to the database. Other bugs and issues will be handled in future releases, but this bug is a very high priority to get fixed.

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Older News (January 10, 2009) — JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 10 is available!

This release should handle the Fixed Price problems, as well as other issues relating to eBay’s new pages. It should read My eBay Watching pages, as well. It should include a favicon for when you’re viewing pages in the internal web server, fix snipe failures when there’s an error doing the pre-snipe, the XML file should contain the ‘winning’ status again, dutch auction recognition is improved, and data storage should be more consistent. It should also resolve the international issues (ticket #508).

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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).

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Written by: Morgan Schweers