Uploading to Gixen
We're looking to use your manager on the desktop, but use Gixen on the backend to upload bids to and snipe on their main and mirror servers....how would we do this?
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Support Staff 1 Posted by cyberfox on 16 Jan, 2015 11:57 AM
Greetings,
If you're willing to test it, I'd love to have a guinea pig. I've been
super-hesitant to go down that path, because unless I do a bunch of things,
I can't easily test it.
I've been working on JBidwatcher 3.0, which deeply integrates scripting
into the system, and I have an implementation of the Gixen API in the
scripting language which I could retool to make it work. I'm not sure what
it would take, but knowing that there's someone willing to
super-pre-alpha-buggy-test it would be exceptionally helpful.
-- Morgan
2 Posted by Frank on 21 Jan, 2015 08:45 PM
I tried replying to the email but looks like it didn't post...as follows.
Hey Morgan, well first let me give you a little background.
We purchase a LOT over ebay. This is a large aspect of our business. We currently use Joybidder and have for several years. We actually pay them a subscription for cloud service so we don't have to depend on desktop app running all the time as we're sniping 24/7.
We have found their cloud services failing of late, and their support completely unresponsive over the past month plus. We're looking for replacements, and right now the main and mirror setup of Gixen is very appealing, however the UI is a little clunky to us, while your jbidwatcher app on the mac is very similar for us to move to from Joybidder, but we'd certainly want the cloud integration, and I saw that check box in the settings of the current version.
We are still willing to pay subscription for said service, but we are looking for something that's a little more reliable than 'super-pre-alpha-buggy'.
If you think you can agree with us that for a reasonable subscription rate, we can get a version of the app that works with gixen main and mirror, and can be at least a 'beta-work-in-progress' and one in which we can rely you're responsive to bugs etc, I think we can certainly make the move.
Please let me know your thoughts. -f
3 Posted by Frank on 27 Jan, 2015 04:35 PM
Hello?
Support Staff 4 Posted by cyberfox on 28 Jan, 2015 09:10 AM
Greetings,
I'm sorry I haven't had much time to respond; I just recently started a new
job, which has sucked all my time away.
I also don't know what to tell you... I don't sell JBidwatcher, so I can't
really imagine what kind of subscription rate you'd expect or be thinking
of. The program is free, although users sometimes send me donations when
they find it particularly useful.
Super-pre-alpha-buggy was in reference to something I'd put together for
you back then, when I offered, entirely outside of the normal release
process, and you could test it and let me know how it worked as a
pre-release kind of testing, not buggy for the long-term. I try to ship
stuff that works, and for everyone, but I can't test against the Gixen API
right now, so I'd need someone who actually uses it 'in anger' to test.
I've written a Gixen API interface in Objective C (
https://github.com/cyberfox/iBidwatcher/blob/master/Classes/GixenResource.m)
and Ruby (http://github.com/cyberfox/gixen) over the years (using the
pre-XML interface, which is still supported), and my idea was to bring the
Ruby version into the JBidwatcher 3.x branch as a library.
The Gixen checkbox in JBidwatcher currently was intended to submit it to a
server (My JBidwatcher) via an Amazon Web Services SQS queue, and the snipe
would then be transmitted to Gixen from that central system. I'd prefer to
do it directly from JBidwatcher, though, so I never finalized that plan.
I'm sorry I haven't been moving very fast on this. I finally returned to
work after 3 months of being unemployed, so I've had my hands full during
the week. I typically work on my projects, including JBidwatcher, on
Saturdays, when I'm working. Unfortunately support often eats up a lot of
that time, so I sometimes don't get as much coding as I'd like done.
-- Morgan Schweers
5 Posted by Frank on 06 Feb, 2015 07:03 PM
Hey Morgan, could you then send us a build of jbidwatcher for us to begin testing?
If I follow what you're saying right, if we can give you feedback on any bugs, you could correct them which would certainly make this a more dependable client.
If that's the case, I'm sure we could send you a reasonable donation, as we'd be appreciative of your work in this matter.
One question though, it seems like Jbidwatcher only syncs with the watch list, would it be possible to instead have it import a watchlist and locally hold items, as we will often overload the 200 item limit, and Joybidder allows us to import the watchlist, clear it on ebay, add more items and import again. If we could have that and the gixen back up, that would be an ideal setup for us.
Please let me know, best, -f
6 Posted by Frank on 17 Feb, 2015 06:35 PM
Hi Morgan, any update?
Support Staff 7 Posted by cyberfox on 17 Feb, 2015 08:04 PM
Greetings,
Sorry, this weekend was taken up with family stuff. I added the Gixen
support library into JBidwatcher, and created a way for the JBidwatcher
code to call it cleanly, but that's all back-end work. I also added a
setting in the 'Snipe' configuration dialog to enable Gixen, and removed it
from the 'My JBidwatcher' section (which is mostly obsolete at this point).
The hard part is mostly getting the UI right.
1. Enabling Gixen support needs to test that you have a Mirror
subscription, and give helpful error messages if you don't.
2. A new snipe dialog and menu entry needs to exist that is specific to
Gixen.
2a. Initially it will be the same as the standard snipe dialog, defaulting
to no group, 6 seconds, both servers.
2b. Eventually it will support things like bid groups, mirror selection,
and time selection.
3. Items in the UI that are sniped on via Gixen need to be demarcated as
Gixen snipes.
4. A new search-type needs to be added, 'Load from Gixen', to import into
JBidwatcher any items that have been set to snipe on Gixen externally.
That's mostly the work that remains to do in order to make Gixen a usable
alternative. It's not much; I can knock it off in a good solid day of
development, but I haven't had one available in a bit. :-/ I've got a few
notebook pages of UI layouts and flow, but I just need to find the time to
turn them into code.
I think you made a comment about syncing with the watch list. JBidwatcher
does have that capability(*), although it's one of the areas eBay tweaks
really often, so it breaks annoyingly frequently. Also because the user
has had the ability to configure their 'My eBay' in various ways, it
becomes pretty hard to consistently scrape that information from them.
(*) JBidwatcher does not 'sync'. It loads. So if you have 100 items on
your watch list, JBidwatcher will try to load them in. But if you delete
50 of them on eBay, JBidwatcher will _NOT_ delete them. It'll see the
other 50, and go, 'I already have those...' and not notice that 50 others
are gone. That is to say, once an item is in JBidwatcher it retains no
knowledge of *how* it got into JBidwatcher. Similarly, if you delete 50 of
the items in JBidwatcher, it will NOT tell My eBay that they are gone.
So anyway, the upshot to this is that your desired use is already
supported, BUT eBay watch list loading is one of the most often-broken
aspects, frustrating to debug, and historically lowest priority for me to
fix.
-- Morgan
8 Posted by Frank on 24 Feb, 2015 07:27 PM
Thanks for the update Morgan. Any idea of an ETA of when this will be in an update? Best, -f