Recently I got a casual query from a user who was interested in what else I had going on. I do have a lot of projects that I work on, along with spending time supporting JBidwatcher.  What follows is a lightly edited version of what I told them…

(1) Most obviously there is JBidwatcher which I spend some time supporting every day via email, forum, and the support site, and sadly a little less time developing, but if you’ve poked at my site you’ve noticed that I’ve got several other projects listed.  There is also one or two that are not listed which I’ll talk about.

(2) One of the most obvious other projects to JBidwatcher users is My JBidwatcher.  It has its own configuration tab in JBidwatcher, and it’s pretty far along in terms of features.

Unfortunately I’ve not implemented the ‘Add Auction’ command in My JBidwatcher yet, nor the ability to send snipes back to your desktop JBidwatcher instance.  All the capabilities to do it are in place, I just haven’t seen enough interest from users to implement it.  My JBidwatcher gets a very small number of occasional users, although it’s been invaluable in helping me debug JBidwatcher, especially recently with the ‘null’ priced items problems.  You can link My JBidwatcher to your desktop app just by entering your account information (user name and password) into the JBidwatcher ‘My JBidwatcher’ configuration.

I really want to make it work better, but I’ve not gotten a confident feel that folks want that capability, or what folks would like from a web interface to JBidwatcher, so I’m unsure about spending time working on it as opposed to other projects.

(3, 4) As for Hacker’s Health (and the iPhone companion app Health Hacker)…  Heh!  In 2007 as part of learning Ruby on Rails, I built a health tracking application for myself.  I still use it, and I’d love others to see it, but it needs some cleanup before that happens.  Fast forward to 2010, when I built an iPhone application around communicating with Google Health, and storing stuff in their data format (which is crazy complex, because it had to support health data vaults, essentially).  Then I started working for Google, and put it on hold, because they were talking about doing one themselves and I didn’t want to step on any toes…  Now that I’m not working for Google anymore, and Google Health has sadly gone away, I’ve revived it and updated my web application and have started making the two of them talk to each other.  This project is lots of fun to build, and very useful as every time I actually put focus on my health it gets better.

(5) One of the last of my publicly acknowledged projects, MacBidwatcher is an application I’m actively working on. Right now it can load eBay auctions, trigger updates, shows thumbnails,  track them in folders, and you can drag and drop items between folders. I’ve added the ability to log in, but only on ebay.com so far. (No international support yet.) I’ve got some prototype code that bids, but I need to build the user interface for bidding, then start adding features to support sniping.

MacBidwatcher is a much more Mac-like application than JBidwatcher though, and my plan is (eventually) to offer it on the Mac App Store, and maybe through non-MAS sales as well.  Even folks like me need to eat.

(6) Not really discussed anywhere, is iBidwatcher which is an iPhone version of JBidwatcher. It’s already got a few cool features (including secure over-the-air sync with JBidwatcher if you’re on a wireless network with a running JBidwatcher instance) but it’s severely hampered by the inability of iPhone applications to do anything in the background. This means it can’t keep the price of a listing up to date when not running.  I’ve written code to scrape eBay’s site on the iPhone, and it works great, but it can only run when you are in the app. It also cannot snipe from the phone, because the phone would have to be on and the app running, which is counter to the idea of a sniping application, i.e. you shouldn’t need to think about it. Instead I’m considering partnering with Gixen, and allowing you to place snipes on their service through iBidwatcher if you have a Gixen Mirror subscription. Their price of $6/year seems reasonable, and I have a lot of respect for the person who runs it.

(7) The least interesting to most JBidwatcher users is Outlinr, which has gotten sidelined as I deal with other projects.  It was a blast to build, and was functional for a while, but server upgrades and the relentless progress of browsers has made it no longer work.  I love outlining as a knowledge-capture model, and think it could be done SO much better than anyone is currently doing it, but I have to focus on projects that I know others are more immediately interested in.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts on the various projects I’ve described, and what you’d like to see out of them.  I’m always looking for more insights into what would be helpful and valuable.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

eBay recently launched their Bid Assistant, which acts similarly to JBidwatcher’s Multisniping feature, except without the sniping.

None the less, it’s good to see them adding features JBidwatcher had six years ago.

Being serious for a moment, I’m actually really happy to see them do this. It’s a straightforward feature, and one they should have had long since. If they make it easy to use it’ll increase bid volumes, and thereby their end revenue. Speaking as an ex-employee, and a shareholder, this is great!

I always considered multisniping a ‘good for eBay’ feature, because it meant one bid could get applied to a number of items, without the user really intervening after the initial setup.

It’s also a hint that they might still be putting new ideas into their platform, which I’m very happy to see. It also ups the ante for programs like mine, to add more extensive algorithmic bidding. (e.g., ‘If I win this, THEN put a snipe on that, because if I can combine shipping I’d want them both…’)

What it is not, is sniping. Specifically:
You cannot schedule bids to be placed at a specific time.
The first version of JBidwatcher that included Multisniping was December 16, 2001, and is the earliest implementation of bid groups / multisniping / bid assistant functionality that I know of. It’s not world changing, but I’m proud of it.

Best of luck with your auctions!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I’ve put up the latest version, 1.0.1 of JBidwatcher.  It’s mainly a bug fix release.  It includes a few new features towards better documentation, error messages, and recognition of eBay states, and a new (still completely optional) approach to the eBay affiliate idea.

One of the important fixes has to do with a wording change; eBay changed ‘You have been outbid’ to ‘You’ve been outbid’, and JBidwatcher didn’t handle the wording change, reporting it as an ‘unknown error’.  Also eBay changed the text on their captcha pages, so JBidwatcher was failing logins for unknown reasons.  Now it should be better at recognizing those situations.

There was a sporadic startup failure when sorting by a currency-based column with unknown values in it, and saving and restarting.  I hope to have addressed that as well.

Very little UI has changed, although the internal FAQ has been enhanced a little, and a whole new FAQ has been put on the web site.  There is also a new community forum area that’s much better than the old SourceForge forums.  In fact, SourceForge is deprecated for everything except bug reports, feature requests, and CVS access to the source.

More information is available at the JBidwatcher 1.0.1 changelog.

• Windows users can download a Windows executable!  (No installation required, it just runs!)
• 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!
• You can also download the Java binary for any other platform, including Linux and Solaris.
  Launch with: java -Xmx512m -jar JBidWatcher-1.0.1.jar
• As always, you can download the source and build it for yourself.

Best of luck with your auctions!

–  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

A concerned user recently asked me how I was doing in the aftermath of the issue with eBay sales of JBidwatcher, specifically:

You seemed pretty depressed about it in your post to the website.

I was.

There was a really bad week there, while I was dealing with all of it, back and forth, and just feeling like crap. I got a lot of user feedback, from a LOT of people, that reminded me, as the concerned user put it, not to let the few jerks make me give up.

I took some time to work on other projects, and I’ve been fiddling with the next major rev of JBidwatcher, mostly cleaning up the code, improving the source layout, fixing small things that nobody else will likely ever see, and writing silly features just for the fun of it. (Like making the internal webserver take ‘events’ to be posted to the various subsystems, so you can add an item, do a bid, or even tell it to fire off a sound effect through a REST-ish interface. You could theoretically ‘script’ JBidwatcher through that.)

I’ve also mostly moved the code base of JBidwatcher to Java 1.5 (mmmm, tasty generics!), since 1.6 is now out. I’ve also been experimenting with including ‘Derby’, an embeddable (in the ‘ship with program’ sense) tiny SQL-based database, so that JBidwatcher’s memory usage doesn’t grow at the same rate as the number of auctions. Also so that it can offload completed auctions, so they’re not kept in memory anymore at all. Yet another thing I’ve been playing with is including a scripting language (something simple) which would get run on certain events, which would allow for making some of the complex rules people have requested as features. I’ve also written up an FAQ I need to publish on the site. (The first question addresses my inability to answer emails consistently, in fact!)

Anyway, all told I (and work!) have been keeping myself busy, albeit quiet. It all helps me get past the issue with the people selling JBidwatcher. Future versions will probably not be open source, however. I may expose the source, or open certain sections, but almost all open source licenses explicitly allow what those folks were doing, and I’ve determined that it’s beyond what I’m comfortable with. One of the things people repeatedly said in private emails was that the open source nature of JBidwatcher was not critical to their appreciation of JBidwatcher. This means I’ll need to extricate myself from Sourceforge in various ways, and cover my own purchase of IntelliJ IDEA, but I think donations will have covered that.

I don’t want to charge for JBidwatcher; I prefer people using it and deciding for themselves what it’s worth to them. Plus, because it’s scraping eBay, I feel bad about asking for money for something that could break the next day. So I expect the program will continue to be no cost. I’m thrilled to get donations, of course, but I don’t build JBidwatcher to make money; I have a day job for that.

At the same time I’m working on building other projects so my morale won’t get torpedoed so badly when someone messes with the sole project I’ve been working on.

One of the other projects I’m working on are a health tracking tool (weight, blood pressure, hours slept, water drank, steps taken, foods eaten with nutrition information, and more stuff like that, with pretty graphs and sparklines (my weight trend: )). The other major one is a comprehensive multi-user outliner tool. Both are entirely web based applications, unlike JBidwatcher, and both are in Ruby on Rails.

I’m sorry that I haven’t been dedicating more time to JBidwatcher, but it’s been fundamentally working okay recently, and I needed to blow off steam by doing cool new stuff. So I’ve been letting it percolate, and rekindling my coding passion by working on other interesting problems.

That’s the status as of now; I hope that this sheds some light on my thought processes, and what I see in the future for JBidwatcher. One important thing to take away is that YES, there is a future for JBidwatcher.

Thank you, every one, who wrote me, donated, or just thought well of me during all this. I appreciate it a great deal more than I can express.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!