Greetings,
Hey folks… I have a fix for the time left problem; I’ve actually had a fix for 3 weeks now, but it takes 8 solid hours to do a full release, and I just haven’t had that in any consistent block.
I’m having major trouble with application signing on Mac OS X, and I’m having to change the release format for Windows, and I don’t even know if Linux will work with the new code… :(
Anyway, I want to at least get a pre-release out soon… On OS X it may require disabling Gatekeeper temporarily. sigh
As for the API, I can’t do that. If you use the API, one of the conditions of the terms of use is that you won’t scrape their site. This means that I couldn’t mix API calls to read the items with scraping to snipe. That said, they’ve had a ‘lite’ API call available for a while that allows getting a JSON representation of updates to an item.
e.g. http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemLite&pbv=0&item=301780967949
I added support for ViewItemLite into the ‘JBidwatcher 3’ source branch (which is what I’ll be doing the next release off of) back in December, so it should be a little better… I’m having to trust eBay a lot, that they won’t just pull away these features, but their own code uses it, so…hopefully. :-/
I really, really want to get a release out that fixes the time left problem. It’s just agonizing how much time it takes, though, and it needs to be in one big, long block.
— Morgan