JBidwatcher: eBay auction sniping software
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4Mouse MacWorld Logo 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.

Latest News Flash (27-Oct-2008 2:30pm PDT)

27-Oct-2008 2:30pm PDT —
eBay has made a substantial change which disallows viewing items on country sites that the item isn't shipped to. This breaks JBidwatcher very hard, because it relies on parsing and recognizing the format of the ViewItem pages. If it has to parse the local eBay sites, it may need to be internationalized to do that. Currently this means that non-US users of JBidwatcher are unable to add items, items already added will be moved to 'Complete' and marked as invalid. If you have items that will ship to the US (even if you don't live in the US), they may still appear. I'm working on a way to fix this, but it may take a little while.
8-Sep-2008 1:30pm PDT —
JBidwatcher 2.0beta8 is being released, as yet 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. More information below.
10-May-2008 1:45pm PDT —
Due to the birth of my first child, JBidwatcher development is on hold for a few weeks.

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 It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth of tuning configuration parameters.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 (September 8, 2008) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 8 is available!

Step by step it's getting better. 2.0beta7 had some problems with duplicating auctions, and in certain cases doubling the actual columns. The latest version (2.0beta8) should ease those issues.

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. As usual, if there are ANY problems, please let me know.

I'm putting this beta out now, to try and resolve a lot of the problems users are having with the 2.0beta7, and because I believe a soon upcoming version will be getting a pretty deep redesign of the sniping and updating engine, and I want to get a fixed version out before I start down that path, in case it takes longer than I expect.

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.
I still strongly recommend backing up your JBidwatcher data directory before installing the beta.

News Flash (August 13, 2008) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 7 is available!

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.

Older News (August 5, 2008) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 6 is available!

JBidwatcher 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.

I believe this version to be more stable than 2.0beta3, but if you have problems running it, please let me know, so I can try and debug them quickly.

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 '<' and '>' 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. More info will be at the 2.0beta6 changelog.

Best of luck with your auctions!
— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!
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
Last modified: Sun Apr 29 13:15:28 PST 2007