What's new in JBidWatcher 2.5.6
May 26, 2014
- This version primarily fixes the recent eBay breakage due to sign-on changes and change-password interstitial pages.
New in JBidWatcher 2.5.5 (Jan 20, 2014)
- This version contains fixes for many different, mostly small, problems that cropped up over the last few months.
New in JBidWatcher 2.5 (Jun 18, 2013)
- 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
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.6 (Oct 3, 2011)
- 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.
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.5 (Apr 11, 2011)
- 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
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.4.1 (Feb 28, 2011)
- Fix breakage due to eBay removing the end-date from the title on many listings
- Try to provide a safety-net for a potential sniping failure bug
- Get eBay pages as compressed data for faster updating
- Paste and Add Auction should add to the currently displayed tab/category
- Allow Basic Authentication lines longer than 80 characters for My JBidwatcher support
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.3 (Feb 28, 2011)
- All ‘null (FP)’ problems should be resolved
- Post-end bid-counts should be correct again
- eBay is testing a new ‘confirm’ page which broke sniping.
- Update-All works again, and is reasonably efficient
- Substantial performance tuning
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.2 (Sep 28, 2010)
- Fix some drag-and-drop issues caused by eBay’s new URL format
- Improve My eBay lookup
- Fix the display problems which made it look like completed items were gone.
- Try to make post-end auction updating work more smoothly
- A bunch of internal bugfixes
New in JBidWatcher 2.1.1 (Aug 9, 2010)
- Bugs fixed:
- Recognize auctions with BIN as auctions so they can be sniped.
- Force the time to synchronize 5 minutes before a snipe fires.
- Lots of tweaks to time synchronization to make it more accurate.
- Make snipe, cancel snipe, and other internal web server functions work
- JBidwatcher was failing to recognize a user as a high bidder if there was a bid retraction.
- Toolbar hide and show again shouldn’t move the login status to the far left of the toolbar.
- Recognize eBay’s error message for sellers trying to bid on their own items.
- Detect reserve listings again, and some other minor reserve-related tweaks.
- A ton of other cleanups and refactorings.
- Features:
- Add selection color setting to the Window menu
- Some work towards providing a sync-with-mobile capability (disabled for now)
- Substantial renovations to the auction update cycle; auctions to update don’t need to be in memory anymore.
- Add selling-item retrieval to the My eBay search; successfully retrieved multiple pages.
- An attempt at getting My eBay watch lists working.
- Add the ability to refresh the log view
- Add a donation button that is easily dismissible.
- Include last-updated information in the Info display.
New in JBidWatcher 2.1 Pre8 (Jun 11, 2010)
- Searches (including Get My eBay Items) work again
- Fixed a failure to start the internal web server if you shut it down and tried to restart it
- Auctions with Buy It Now and Fixed Price listings are once again distinct
- For many users JBidwatcher was failing to save configuration settings during shutdown
- Make displayed bid values more consistent, and try to reduce the number of ‘null’ prices that are displayed.
- When deleting rows, sometimes they would be replaced with ‘*’ and would cause all kinds of problems until you shut down and restarted JBidwatcher. This should be resolved.
New in JBidWatcher 2.1 Pre7 (Jun 1, 2010)
- Bugs fixed:
- Sniping works again for users who have time sync disabled, or are bidding on items that aren’t on eBay US.
- Don’t show auction listings as fixed price listings when they have a ‘Quantity’ field in the item details.
- Sellers and high bidder names are now parsed correctly after eBay’s recent changes.
- If you customize your selection color as per the FAQ, it wasn’t being used anymore. It works again.
- Private listings are recognized again.
- Don’t take up as much disk space with the database log
- Small features and improvements:
- More consistent synchronization with My JBidwatcher, including thumbnails, and entirely ignoring it if the user hasn’t set it up.
- Added the number of watchers, and promptly removed it as eBay made the data unavailable anonymously
- Click the user info area to shrink it if you’re having display issues (flickering, half-visible, etc.)
New in JBidWatcher 2.1 Pre6 (May 3, 2010)
- No longer presenting the ‘Need Help!’ dialog
- Bugs fixed:
- The newest forms of bad HTML found on eBay listings shouldn’t break the parser anymore
- Don’t mistake auctions for fixed price listings
- Recognize eBay’s new URL format.
- Don’t initiate sniping until the eBay time has been loaded from the server
- If the pre-snipe had already fired (2 minutes before the actual snipe), and you changed the snipe amount, it would instantly place a bid for the amount you entered as a snipe. This is fixed.
- Small features and improvements:
- Don’t present a dialog message when cancelling a multisnipe; events like that should just quietly obey.
- Reduce the number of unimportant exceptions that show in the log file
- Provide the ability to easily submit error logs
- Improve the integration with My JBidwatcher
- Improve high bidder recognition substantially
- Simplify tab save/restore handling, and apply a tab ordering fix (patch from Andreas Stempfhuber).
- Added a patch from mickle_ak which should improve corporate proxy support.
- Features:
- Initial support for Gixen integration via My JBidwatcher. This isn’t complete, but it’s getting close
- Deep improvements to the Thumbnail view and taking the Mac UI improvements and applying them everywhere, including (I believe) a working implementation on Windows and Linux!
New in JBidWatcher 2.1 Pre5 (Jan 4, 2010)
- eBay Fixes:
- Multiple parsing fixes for high bidders and fixed price listings.
- Recognize new listing types, and stop failing on listings with ‘end’ in their titles.
- Parsing fixes for high bidders, new listing types, listings with ‘end’ in the title,
- Make My eBay Watching pages work better. (Probably still not perfect!)
- Work around some really bad eBay HTML due to a popular seller tool.
- Various fixes to deal with eBay’s new ‘Top-rated seller’ heading (seller names and feedback numbers/percentages).
- UI Fixes:
- Font issues
- Improved layout and UI, especially on the Mac. I think it’s prettier, especially in thumbnail mode.
- Deleting multiple items doesn’t trigger a race condition anymore, and now works.
- Improved UI consistency.
- Show Information and Set Shipping dialogs don’t go crazy if the images are huge, or the number of events are large.
- Fixed the damn toolbar Select / Status overlap and other tweaks to improve the UI.
- Improved the functionality of the status bar, integrating stuff that had been per-tab into the global state.
- Worked around a nasty Java 1.6 bug which made pulling up the context menu on multiple selections impossible.
New in JBidWatcher 2.0.1 (Jan 4, 2010)
- 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
New in JBidWatcher 2.0 Beta8 (Sep 10, 2008)
- Version 2.0 Beta8
- This version is not expected to resolve all of the after-auction-updating problems, early move-to-completed oddness, delete and immediately re-add, or problems upgrading from 1.0.2. This version may expose other issues that were hidden behind the fixed bugs, but it should still be a better version than 2.0beta7.
New in JBidWatcher 1.0 (Sep 5, 2006)
- Fixed the breakage on eBays new shipping calculator format, so that when eBay does re-roll out that change, JBidwatcher will be ready for it.
- JBidwatcher wasn't remembering its screen position and size sometimes.
- Thumbnails are now resized if they're over a certain size.
- Sorting now defaults to single-column sorting. If you hold control while clicking further columns, they become secondary sorts, and this no longer breaks JBidwatcher in several ways.
- Added a 'Snipe Amount Shipping' column at the request (and donated code) of a user.
- Right-click behavior on unselected lines is now more in line with user expectations.
- Slowed the rate of re-logins, to hopefully reduce the amount of issues eBay has with the program logging in too often.
- Several start-up and shut-down freezes and crashes have been resolved.
- Lots of multi-monitor fixes.
- Many tab and column display issues have been fixed up.
- Dozens of small UI improvements and bugfixes.