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jBidWatcher Changelog

What's new in jBidWatcher 2.99pre5 RC

Nov 4, 2017
  • This fixes several critical and less-critical bugs that arose with the 2.99pre4 release. I’ve been working on a significant revision to JBidwatcher for some time, including the addition of scripting capabilities. This version incorporates recent bug fixes and those larger changes.

New in jBidWatcher 2.5.6 (May 26, 2014)

  • Primarily fixes the recent eBay breakage due to sign-on changes and change-password interstitial pages. It also adds an experimental fix for ‘App Nap’ on OS X Mavericks.

New in jBidWatcher 2.5 (Mar 19, 2012)

  • 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 2.1.5 (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 on Windows and Linux

New in jBidWatcher 2.1.4 (Feb 27, 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
  • Improve the look of JBidwatcher’s minimized window under Mac OS X

New in jBidWatcher 2.1.3 (Dec 5, 2010)

  • Fixed issues:
  • 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 27, 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 bug fixes

New in jBidWatcher 2.1.1 (Aug 8, 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
  • Remove unused ‘Check for Updates’ menu item under Mac OS X; it uses Sparkle instead.
  • 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 Beta 8 (Jun 10, 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 Beta 7 (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. That was a bad one. :(
  • 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
  • On the Mac, JBidwatcher would start up with a fresh database, without any of the previous listings in it. Unfortunately, if 2.1pre6 was the first version you’ve run, 2.1pre7 will appear to cause that problem. :(
  • For Mac users using the disk image (.dmg) version, future updates should upgrade cleaner as the app name no longer includes the version number. Also using the https site for Sparkle updates.
  • 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 Beta 6 (May 3, 2010)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • Fix the blank-screen (but auctions are there, and only visible when selected) on Mac OS X Tiger
  • 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.
  • Fix drag-and-drop on Linux (patch by Eric)
  • 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
  • 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 Beta 5 (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.
  • Mac OS X changes:
  • Snow Leopard fixes (the ‘minimize loses UI’ and ’doesn’t log in automatically’ bugs)
  • Add the Sparkle auto-update framework for Mac OS X users!
  • Several My JBidwatcher fixes, including better change detection for synching only truly changed listings up to My JBidwatcher
  • Transitioned to a fully git-based project (See JBidwatcher’s source on GitHub)

New in jBidWatcher 2.1 Beta 4 (Aug 9, 2009)

  • A pre-release of the next major version (2.1), which should fix a large number of eBay issues which cropped up after their most recent spate of changes.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0.1 (Feb 23, 2009)

  • 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 (Feb 15, 2009)

  • 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.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 11 (Feb 5, 2009)

  • There's a bug in multisniping that has the potential to fail to cancel later items when you win an auction, meaning you might win multiple items. Please upgrade immediately.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 10 (Jan 12, 2009)

  • 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.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 8 (Sep 8, 2008)

  • More bugfixes.
  • This should reduce or eliminate the duplicate auction problem, mainly.
  • The error log display should work, and the ascending/descending column icons were backwards.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 7 (Aug 18, 2008)

  • The previous version (2.0beta6) was definitely better than 2.0beta5, but exposed a number of issues that were hidden, including more launch failures, problems updating auctions, incorrect sort orders for currencies, repeated save errors, and more.
  • The latest version should resolve those, and should also help with the occasional issue where the display configuration on Mac OS X would get corrupted, lose it's columns, and persist in that state.
  • As a related change, this may also reduce long term memory usage on some systems.
  • This version is not expected to resolve all of the after-auction-updating problems, move-to-completed oddness, auction duplication issues, 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 2.0beta6 for most people.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 6 (Aug 5, 2008)

  • Version 2.0beta3 has been having some severe issues, including problems with snipe timings. Nothing that should be causing major issues, but it's possible for it to repetitively try snipes, not realizing it succeeded, and in the worst (and rare) case, fail to snipe. I had reports that some very early testers have had launch failures running JBidwatcher 2.0beta5, and these are fixed in 2.0beta6.
  • This version improves the '--usb' parameter to mostly do everything folks who want to run JBidwatcher off a USB could want. It also fixes many small UI issues here and there, including a new library on Mac OS X for UI issues. It should improve the database consistency, support returns for 'don't reload delted items', bid result recognition is improved, items with '' in their title can be brought into JBidwatcher, and sorting is generally kept more consistent. Feedback detection works again. There should be some performance gains as well.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 5 (Aug 4, 2008)

  • Build a .DMG for Mac OS X
  • Upgrade the Quaqua library to fix some glaring UI issues in JBidwatcher on Mac
  • Simplify the build process for Mac OS X, so it's possible to build and run easily. (#123)
  • If you set the auctions.savepath configuration value in the advanced configuration to an empty string, it won't archive any of the data it usually keeps there. This does not work with the --usb option.
  • Reorder the eBay configuration tab as per lmop's suggestions, and provide an actual link to the Search Manager on it. (#30)
  • If the small thumbnail column is visible, don't show the larger image in the tooltip except when the cursor is over the thumbnail itself.
  • Set a minimum width; this will only work for Java 1.6, but it should generally prevent the logged-in-status and icon from overlapping the toolbar.
  • Try and make the '--usb' option even more useful, by fixing up all the associated paths. This stomps on some configuration values at startup, in order to force the use of the current directory as the base for JBidwatcher files.
  • Refresh the list of tabs when we pull up the Tab Properties dialog (#86)
  • Fix the web-interface view so it works again (#61) and has a favicon
  • Accepted a patch to fix thumbnail regexes so it picks the right thumbnail
  • Various interface fixes (#128)
  • Improve deletion speed and intelligence
  • Several fixes to improve database consistency
  • Under Mac OS X if you closed JBidwatcher by rebooting or Cmd-Q it behaved subtly differently, and could fail to save changed data to the auction database.
  • Various improvements to the bidding process to improve consistency, speed, and recognition.
  • Repair support for 'Don't reload deleted items'
  • Get the charset from the page, and try to use that to convert the text before processing it.
  • Text in the Insurance field of an auction could cause the auction's currency to be set wrong. (#206)
  • Snipes sometimes weren't being saved between runs, or if they were, weren't being queued to actually fire.
  • Fix a data conversion issue that was causing bad characters in the data.
  • Fewer auctions should get lost on the way to their own tab, and find themselves sitting in 'current'.
  • Fix the colors and icons help file (although it's not complete, now)
  • Change to ebay.es in the browse-to drop-down.
  • Feedback detection works again.
  • JBidwatcher can now load auctions which have illegal characters ('') in their titles. eBay doesn't escape them properly, and so JBidwatcher was failing to parse the page.
  • Ensure that all database statements, tables, and connections are committed and shut down at the close of JBidwatcher.
  • Updates should once again occur by end date.
  • If something changes in an auction, resort the tab that it's in.
  • Backed out several scripting changes, since scripting (and the associated startup time hit) was so poorly received.
  • Huge amounts of code cleanup all over the source, improving the design and simplifying where possible.
  • Speedups by doing data operations directly on the database, instead of keeping all the auctions in memory at all times.
  • Changed hosting services; JBidwatcher's main page is now hosted on the same server as the forum server. This saves me around $100/mo. in hosting fees.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 3 (May 9, 2008)

  • Version 2.0b3 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.

New in jBidWatcher 2.0 Beta 2 (Apr 29, 2008)

  • A tab menu in the menu bar for configuring your tabs
  • An activity and log viewer (rudimentary right now)
  • A parameter for both running on a USB drive, and multiple users
  • A light freshening of the UI through new icons and other small changes
  • Links to related web tools (forums, for example)
  • Platform-specific features (Installer on Windows, new UI library on OS X)
  • There's a 'Test Login' button on the eBay configuration tab!
  • A clear indicator of current login status in the toolbar
  • A thumbnail column
  • Indian Rupee support
  • Much better parsing, including fixes for most major current problems
  • Per-item events should be preserved between runs
  • Comments and 'valid' status should be preserved between runs
  • Always focus on the text field when for the 'Add Auction' dialog
  • A better icon indicating there was a problem loading an item
  • Recognize 'button' tags as input tags, improving login consistency
  • Thumbnails are being loaded
  • 'Report Bug' goes to the Lighthouse page now
  • The eBay server menu is back
  • better non-English character support
  • preserving the currency of items correctly between runs
  • remembering snipes between runs
  • retrieving and displaying shipping and location information
  • recognize deleted items versus items that we're having network trouble loading
  • recognizing the latest 'image not present' thumbnail
  • fixing the 'Buy' operation
  • supporting Indian Rupees
  • preserve last bid and last bid quantity between runs
  • visibly sort tables correctly on first display so the rows aren't in an inconsistent state
  • sped up 'shut down' for large auction collections