Topic: JBidwatcher Help / eBay login broken

Greetings,

Click the checkbox-like toolbutton, or go to File | Configure.

Select the ‘eBay’ tab, and enter your username and password in the appropriate text boxes.

It should work, then.

— Morgan Schweers

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / eBay login broken

I’ve tried on both Linux and MaxOSX and whenever I try to “Get My eBay Items” I get this error message on the console:

Cannot load My eBay pages without a userid and password.

what gives?

I can’t submit bids either.

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Add Auction Link in Web Interface

Greetings,
Sure, I’d love that!

I haven’t done much extension of the web interface, because even I don’t use it much, but I’m hearing more folks using it, so a new feature like that would be great to add in!

Drop me with the patches in an email at:
cyberfox@users.sourceforge.net

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Add Auction Link in Web Interface

I wanted to add Auctions at work to my server at home. so i extended your webinterface with a link to insert new auctions. If you would like insert this into your project i could send you the classes. (I did some extensions in JBidProxy and in HTMLDump. I like the JDialog class. Nice to make a fast dialog.

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Fields / Features continued...

Greetings,

The search code relies on eBay’s searching, and so an ‘only new items’ feature isn’t really doable without a LOT of bookkeeping, and would still be loading (over the network) the auctions that will be discarded.

I could support the idea of ’don’t re-add deleted auction id’s’, although that list would get large without a ‘purge date’ of some sort. I suppose 10 days being the limit on auctions, it makes sense to make it a 10 day purge rate, but eBay Stores items can last longer, and might be showing up in searches.

Much of the rest of what you describe could be handled by the idea of multiple tabs, and sending items between tabs. The last part perhaps could be best served by a ‘search completed auctions’ search, which once again could be filtered into its own tab, and you could then use that tab to determine the average price range at a glance.

I love new ideas, definitely. I have to filter them somewhat, based on how the code works, and how it can be massaged to work reasonably, but I’m very willing to consider the ideas. I can’t come up with all the cool features alone, I know that!

Thanks muchly,

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Fields / Features continued...

Greetings,

Well, currently I use what’s called a ‘stable sort’, which is to say that when you sort the items by field X, things with the same value of X don’t change order. This means that you could order by (for example) clicking on the time left column, then clicking on the seller list, and you would have a list that was sorted by seller, with all the items per seller sorted by end time.

However, the user-defined columns is a little more difficult. It’s actually a pretty difficult feature. The auxiliary information would have to be stored with the item in the AuctionEntry object, and propagating the column names through everythough would be really frustrating.

What I’d vastly prefer to do is make user-defined tabs available. This would let you collate items into their own tabs based on what you’re interested in seeing. For example, you could create a ‘stereo’ tab, a ‘sports cards’ tab, a ‘toys’ tab, etc… Your searches could have either a target tab that they’ll fill into, or they could just fill into a tab based on their search name. (It’s why I created named searches in the first place.)

This provides most of the functionality you’re looking for, without having to clutter up the column list.

Does that sound reasonable?

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Fields / Features continued...

Just a few more ideas after 2 days of use…

Add a “last run” field to the searces in search manager. Then, when you want to “do search”
you are given the option of receiving only new items since last run.

Why? You run a search for widgets on Monday, you get 50 sucked in — 10 days worth of auctions.
You peruse the list and quickly delete 40 and decide to just follow the bidding on 10 of em. If you run the search again on Wed, you don’t want those 40 pre-screened, deleted auctions to come back in again. Maybe you add the option of the user also entering a date in case he screws up and deleted things by mistake.

This should be easy since I think Ebay searches already suport this. If not, you could maintain an N-day cache of deleted auction ids, so you can chek against this before adding it in.

My last message mentioned some “User Fields.” Add to that a “From Search” field….which gets set to the name of the search which sucked in this item. Why? If you’re looking for widgets, thingamabobs and dohickeys, and each search sucks in 50 of each, you can quickly sort them into contectual groups to track. Note: you’d want to be able to have hierarchical searching, so you can say “sort by the from-search field, and within each such group, by time remaining.” Maybe this argues for a few different JBidWatch “views” by time remaining,. by group, by seller, by price range, etc.

Maybe some primitve spredsheet functions? Why? First let’s review. Here’s a use case given my previous suggestions.

Say I want to buy a widget. I do a search, get 50 auctions, then prune that down to just the 14 which actually represent the the two styles of widget I want. So, first, I’ll set the “User Fields” appropriately — e.g., 5 of them will be “Type A widget” and 9 “Type B widget”

Now, maybe I want to track these auctions for a while, and not bid immediately. I let some auctions complete without bidding. But…it would be cool if I could maintain some info….like Max, Min and Avg price which each type of widget has already gone for. If I’m looking for a $600-$1000 piece of stereo equipment, I might want to let JBidWatch run for 2 months and compile whole histogram of what that item trades for. When I am ready to jump in and bid, this would provide me a lot of useful info that most bidders wouldnt have. It could tell me, for instance, that even though I might be willing to snipe a particular auction which is now at $750, this item has gone for as low as $580…and maybe I should just wait some more. Useful, no?

Anyway, let me know if you find such ideas useful, and I’ll keep ’em coming.

Cheers,
JH

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Fields / Features continued...

Hey, great tool.

A simple organizational twiddle that would be useful would be a couple of editable user fields. Sometimes you’d like to have one (or more) keys to group and quickly sort all the auctions in a particular context — e.g., stereo equipment, baseball cards, toys, etc. Once you’re following 25+ searches, this would help a lot.

Then maybe, a “sort by” capability, so you could sort by User Field #1 and then by *Time Left." Maybe 2, 3 or 4 levels of sort would be a win.

Cheers

JH

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Source code questions. Where to post?

Greetings,

Either is fine.

You could post here, or send questions via email to cyberfox@users.sourceforge.net. Either way is fine with me, although I’m going away for a few days from Monday to Thursday. I’m spending Christmas with my SO’s family, and their internet access is a 38.4 modem, so I’m kinda out of the loop until I get back.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Source code questions. Where to post?

Hi!

I have a few source code questions. Do you want me to post them here or somewhere else or send them to you by email?

Thank you!

Andrey.

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Main config file

Greetings,

You can pass what .cfg file to use in on the command line, to start the program… Does that help?

The savefile line says where the auctions.xml file will be saved, the search.savefile line says where searches will be saved. (I haven’t gotten to giving the searches savefile a UI configuration entry.)

Under Windows, you can do this easily by editing the shortcut. Under Linux, it should be just as straightforward, or if you’re running it by hand, swap to a shell script. If it’s MacOSX, I think you may have to make a shell script for each of the ebay accounts, and put the shell script on your desktop.

JBidwatcher will save its configuration to the file passed on the command line, it will store to the files listed in the configuration for savefile, and searches.savefile, so if all that stuff is set up, it should work fine.

The only thing that might be an issue is the display.cfg file, which lays out your display. I think I may have forgotten to locate that wherever the JBidWatch.cfg file gets written.

Give that a shot, and let me know how it works out.

— Morgan Schweers

p.s.
It’s just:
java -jar JBidWatch-0.9pre4.jar /Users/cyberfox/acct1/acct.cfg
and
java -jar JBidWatch-0.9pre4.jar /Users/cyberfox/acct2/acct.cfg

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Main config file

I’d rather have a config option include what config file to use. Before the version that switched to a main config file in the user dir – I had two dirs set-up, each for its own ebay account. This messed me up a bit. Any thoughts on going back to a local config file, in the dir of the program?

Thanks,
Ryan

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Feature Request: Remove Button Bar

In order to make JBidWatcher as small as possible on my screen… I’d like the option to remove the button bar completely from the screen. All the options on the buttons are available via menu items.. so no functionality would be lost.

The EBAY time could be moved down to the status bar or up to the menu bar.. leaving the ability to remove the buttons.

In order to protect someone from shooting themselves in the foot.. this could be a manual
entry option into the configuration file.

Thanks for considering this.

Sam

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Features / Request

Greetings,
1a. You can do this with the ‘Edit’ window (copy URL).
1b. Drag and Drop would be really cool, but all the browsers take different types of data. If I can find a consistent type that they all accept, I’ll make it a drag source.

2. I like this idea, but I need to figure out how to break up the status bar, in order to show something like that.

3. The current version SHOULD show items with bids, but without the reserve met, as still black text instead of coloring it red or blue. So if you see bids, but the items coloration looks like it doesn’t have bids, it means the reserve isn’t met.

4. Errrf, lemme think about this. I have ways of doing this, since it can export its XML already via an HTTP request. I can have one JBidwatcher being a server for your others, for example. I’’ll try to treat this with more detail later, but for now I’m pretty sure I’m not going to build it as a pure-server and pure-UI versions, anytime soon.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Problem On Startup

thanks for the reply!

I’ll see what I can find.

I’m sure I installed that run time but I’ll give
it another check .

Sam

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Problem On Startup

Greetings,
JBidwatcher uses the Swing API for doing its graphical user interface. This means that it will not work with Kaffe, the default JVM that gets installed with a ‘raw’ install of RedHat, and some other Linux distributions.

Go to:

http://java.sun.com/getjava

and follow the directions, to get the official Sun version of Java that will work with JBidwatcher. Kaffe is a very old and not totally Java2 compatible, Java Virtual Machine. Sun and IBM both have good free (as in beer) JVM’s for Linux, although IBM unfortunately hasn’t updated theirs recently. (That’s why the URL I gave is for Sun’s version. The IBM one will work, it’s just a little older.)

Good luck!

— Morgan Schweers

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Web-based installation possible?

Greetings,
The program updates its time with eBay’s time about once every 30-40 minutes. However, in 0.9pre2, this will not work, because of some eBay changes.

Unfortunately, work has me absolutely SWAMPED, so I wasn’t able to get a new version out this weekend.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Problem On Startup

When I try to run JBidWatcher.. I get the following
error..
When I attempt to start the applet with the
usual java command the following errors
appear.. I’m not sure where to move forward
for troubleshooting….

java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError: [exception was
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Ljavax/swing/UIManager;]
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:native)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:59)
at kaffe.jar.ExecJarName.main(ExecJarName.java:54)
at kaffe.jar.ExecJar.main(ExecJar.java:71)
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Ljavax/swing/UIManager;
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:native)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:59)
at kaffe.jar.ExecJarName.main(ExecJarName.java:54)
at kaffe.jar.ExecJar.main(ExecJar.java:71)
[sam@kyle sam]$

I’m fairly certain I’ve got something set up incorrectly
since I still consider myself a linux noob.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Sam
LM8.2
JRE 1.3.1

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / New Features / Request

First I’d like to say that JBidWatcher is a great utility, I am enjoying it with tremendous success. JBW might have the greatest ROI potential ever! :^)

I have some thoughts for new features, some of which I’ve noticed mentioned in a previous thread.

1) The ability to copy to the clipboard an auction’s URL would be nice. This might also be a drag-n-drop capability (dragging from JBW to another window would paste the auction’s URL.) I often find myself wanting to send auction URLs through IM so I can coordinate bidding with other people.

2) I saw this mentioned in another post: the ability to show the sum of the cost of several auctions. The way I think this would work best would be to have a small place at the end of the status bar that shows the sum of the prices of all the currently selected auctions. That way you can quickly and easily total up a few items without even visiting any menus.

3) Another one from a previous post: the ability to see if the reserve it met on an auction, and maybe an icon representation of payment options (PayPal, etc.)

4) A way to share auction data between copies of JBW. Ideally I’d love to see this someday be a client-server app, where a process stays running on a server that is talking to ebay, and then a seperate client piece that allows users to connect to the server to get status and make changes. I realize this is a HUGE change, but it’s something that might be worth thinking about someday down the road. The problem I’m facing is that I’m often away from the computer running JBW when I need to check on status or make changes to bids/snipes. I love the current Java implementation, I wouldn’t want to see it done as JSP with an HTML frontend— rather what I’d like would be to have the current program essentially posting the auction data to a server that then does all the actual work. I haven’t gotten under the hood enough to see if this is within the realm of possibility, but maybe it HTTP POSTs the XML config data to a server process that can then execute the various bids/snipes. This is just rambling blue-sky dreaming, but it’d be great for the hardcore ebayers, and also for people who have a slow link to their desktop. Servers tend to have good uptimes, hardware redundancy and fast network connectivity. All those things would help make JBW even better.

Sorry for the rambling, thanks again for a great tool, and I’m looking forward to pre3 and the 1.0 release!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Web-based installation possible?

thanks for your answer I have still one ask. in which interval is the time of the program adapted with e-bay the time?

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Two new features I just added...

Greetings,
Yeah, that’s the plan…

I changed a lot of stuff, in cleaning up the code, so I want it to get decently tested. I’m still trying to figure out how to fit in the documentation I need to make this a 1.0… That’s my big ‘weakness’ in the program now. I’ve got other features to implement, but for me the documentation is what’ll make it a 1.0.

Thanks muchly for the words of praise!

— Morgan

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Two new features I just added...

Are you going to release this as pre3? :)

Much thanks for your great work,

Ryan

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Two new features I just added...

Greetings,
Well, I’ve got a time synchronization problem I need to make a release to fix… Beyond that, I added the following two often-asked-for features:

Drag and drop from a foreign eBay site now adds the auction! Note that it still gets it from the US site, but it figures out the item correctly, and everything, so no more cutting and pasting necessary for German, English, Australian, etc., sites.

Tooltip-comments. The comment will now (FINALLY!) display in the tooltip when you hover your cursor over an item with a comment. HUZZAH!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Web-based installation possible?

Greetings,
Ah, I think I understand.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Web-based installation possible?

Hello.
I want upload JBidWatch on my webspace(Linux-Apache Webserver), not a local installation on my home computer. How can i start this program ; program-design of the html file, and settings in the configuration tool.
Thanks for your help.
Peter Lehr