[decursive]

so i've started working on an ebay searching/sniping app because i couldn't find an application that worked and worked well. rather than describing it through words, here are some pictures

searching:


sniping: (this part in under construction)


so as i continue working on it, i'd like to know if any of you want something specific or just have a general suggestion. all ideas are welcome.

also, i wouldn't mind name suggestions for the app, i'm low on creativity at the moment.

oh, and it'll be free.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by decursive:
so i've started working on an ebay searching/sniping app because i couldn't find an application that worked and worked well. rather than describing it through words, here are some pictures

searching:
<snip>

sniping: (this part in under construction)
<snip>

so as i continue working on it, i'd like to know if any of you want something specific or just have a general suggestion. all ideas are welcome.

also, i wouldn't mind name suggestions for the app, i'm low on creativity at the moment.

oh, and it'll be free.

Looks pretty good so far.

By sniping, I'm assuming that means bidding?

I'm not usually a fan of the "giant table view" look. Perhaps you could put an info pane to the right, where you can select an item and get detailed info, and perhaps render the actual page using WebKit? It would also be cool if you could collect all the photos of the product in a uniform view in the same info pane. It also seems that some items have the UPC field filled out, and searching the number in Google brings up a user maintained UPC database... might be an interesting if you could grab data from there.

Also, the capitalized entries annoy me, could you possibly include an option to normalize them?

The search field seems unnecessarily long.. it shouldn't need to take the full length of the window. Perhaps take an iTunes/Safari approach and place it in the toolbar? Some toolbar icons would be nice too and would let you decrease the horizontal width of the toolbar. You can find some free use toolbar icons on Mike Matas's site if they help.

What do add and remove item do? I'm assuming you can't actually list items using your app? Does Input Item Manually let you put in some sort of eBay ID to add an item to the sniping/bidding list?

What's the difference between Refresh and Reload Search Results? Does Refresh apply to just the sniping/bidding?

Does Toggle View switch between search view and sniping view? It might be better if you had a source list of sorts like iTunes. Where it has the Music Store or Search as one item and then your Library or Bid Items as another. Then I'm sure you could probably find some other items to fill it up This would help fix the seemingly redundant toolbar items in each view and would make a lot more sense (IMO).

Can the time left data be a little bit friendlier? Possibly following the "1d 5h 3m" format of eBay? Or even "1 day, 5 hours, 3 minutes" to be a bit wordy.

In the snipe view, again I'm not a big fan of the stretching bid text field It seems like the flow for bidding on an item would be kind of slow... search for an item, select it, view its web page for more info, and then for some reason, close the window, go back to your app, and make a bid. If you implemented the info pane like I mentioned earlier, you could provide the user with enough info to help them decide whether to bid or not. And then you could place the bid field and button in the pane at a much more reasonable, static, size.

I'm not sure I like the idea of a check mark as a selected item. To me I get the impression of something being checked off, finished etc... Not necessarily being "selected". Perhaps there's another symbol you can use? Like a dot or an aqua orb. Or perhaps a check box.

Does eBay provide you with any info on what the item was categorized under? it would be pretty cool if you could somehow utilize this info. Possibly using additional headers, adding graphical icons ("technology", "books" etc...). And then letting the user search for specific things in the search field.

Browsing would be a nice feature. Watson's Amazon tool is a pretty good example of this (I think anyways).

The stars seem a little pixelated and Mac OS 9ish for my taste. If you care, I whipped up some quick anti-aliased stars. I actually stole the shape from iTunes rating stars.. but who cares? They're 13x13 pixels:



Anyways, hopefully all of this can give you something to work with

P.S. I'm admittedly an eBay newbie, and this probably isn't a good thread for this but could any eBay user explain to me something about bidding? When an item has a few bids and is listed at being "$5.50", what does that mean exactly? I understand the idea of proxy bidding, where perhaps I'll bid $20.00 on the item which was before $5.50. Will it still be listed at $5.50 or perhaps something slightly higher? Because I know it won't list it as $20.00. Does it just keep it at $5.50 until someone finally outbids me, say with $25.00, and then it'll list it as $5.50? Sorry to derail your thread, but this is just something I never got

[Truepop]

free as in beer?

the only names I can come up with right now: eBid ?

I am not sure if it's do able but I would like see some way to have a listing watch view that sync with my.ebay.com. I have tried ebay programs before and one thing that would throw me off is I would bookmark the listing in the program but there was no way to view that list of bookmarks on another computer.

[gorickey]

What service are you going through in order to perform the sniping? eSnipe.com?

Any chance of a picture preview of the item (like Sherlock v3)?

[Nexus5]

also, i wouldn't mind name suggestions for the app, i'm low on creativity at the moment.

iBay?

and....
international support would be great.

nexus5.

[gorickey]

Oh yeah, and for a name, how about?

SniperSearch

[decursive]

Originally posted by Synotic:
a lot of awesome stuff

that was a lot, so i'll take things one at a time. (but not in order)

first, let me clear up a few things. sniping is bidding at the last possible moment in order to win an auction at a lower price. it stops other people from bidding against you (though there are some fallacies). my app does multi-sniping which works like this: you select several of the same item, tell if the price you want, and it snipes (bids) on them until you win one of them at the price you want and stops. this is what the "add" and "remove" items are (though maybe a better name would be appropriate).

so in the screenshots, this is what i've done: first, i search for r-type final. it gives me a list of results. i double click the ones i want, or click "add item" and the items get a check mark next to them. this means they've been added to the multi-sniping list. i then switch to snipe view, which contains those same items, and input the price i want on that item. when i hit snipe, the application will start bidding on my selected items until it gets one at the price i wanted.

the application is also document based, so you can start one multisnipe, open up another window, and start another.

it's really quite self explanatory once you use it. and it'll be a bit clearer when i change "toggle view" to a standard view selector (the kind of thing in the finder).

refresh gets undated info on one item, reload does the search again. reload i just put in there, and i'm not sure it's useful, but since someone might feel otherwise i'll likely retire it to the customize sheet.

the info pane thing i'm unsure of, but if you click "view webpage" it'll bring up the item's page in a window in the app. so basically you can go through the items and hit view webpage and it'll show them fairly fast in the app, and since i make it only have one view webpage window open, it won't get too cluttered.

i will definitely try to implement more ways to search, but this problem is ebay uses a crazy propriety url scheme to do advanced searches (for example, _W0QQsasaleclassZ1 in the url means don't include buy-it-nows). so i've got to see if i can decode that.

category browsing is great idea, i'll see if i can find a way to make that work.

time will definitely be represented in nicer way, it's just how it is now because NSDate returns a time difference in milliseconds, and that's even less useful.

the check marks and stars are just there to show how it works. in fact i stole the stars from ebay. they are by no means what eventually is going to be there, because i am no artist. the stars you've made are FANTASTIC, but they don't match up to the ebay ones, and i want to maintain some conformity. if you'd be willing to create "shooting star" versions of them i'd be more than willing to use them. they don't have to actually be shooting, just glowing or something. here's how ebay gives feedback stars, so i'd only need one for each of these colors

Yellow Star = 10 to 49 points
Blue Star = 50 to 99 points
Turquoise Star = 100 to 499 points
Purple Star = 500 to 999 points
Red Star = 1,000 to 4,999 points
Green Star = 5,000 to 9,999 points
Yellow Shooting Star = 10,000 to 24,999 points
Turquoise Shooting Star = 25,000 to 49,999 points
Purple Shooting Star = 50,000 to 99,999 points
Red Shooting Star = 100,000+ points

a blank or white star for people with less than ten would also be nice.

anyway, thanks for the great suggestions there. i'll keep it all in mind as i continue working on the app.

[decursive]

Originally posted by gorickey:
What service are you going through in order to perform the sniping? eSnipe.com?

Any chance of a picture preview of the item (like Sherlock v3)?

since ebay wants to charge a ridiculous amount for their api, and all the sniping services online are out for the money, the app will be doing the sniping itself (with some thanks to the author of jbidwatcher).

the preview pics are a good idea. personally, i didn't know sherlock even had an ebay module, i never use it. but now that you've pointed it out, i'll take a look.

[decursive]

Originally posted by Truepop:
free as in beer?

the only names I can come up with right now: eBid ?

I am not sure if it's do able but I would like see some way to have a listing watch view that sync with my.ebay.com. I have tried ebay programs before and one thing that would throw me off is I would bookmark the listing in the program but there was no way to view that list of bookmarks on another computer.

free as in beer at first, then free as in speech later.

viewing my ebay items was on my list, but syncing things up might be interesting...

[as2]

Support for international eBay sites would be great.

Adam

[iOliverC]

Originally posted by as2:
Support for international eBay sites would be great.

Adam

God yes, I don't think Sherlock supports co.uk. One question about sniping, what if another user is 'sniping' the same item, who wins?

Thanks,
Oliver

[Synotic]

Originally posted by decursive:
<snip>

the check marks and stars are just there to show how it works. in fact i stole the stars from ebay. they are by no means what eventually is going to be there, because i am no artist. the stars you've made are FANTASTIC, but they don't match up to the ebay ones, and i want to maintain some conformity. if you'd be willing to create "shooting star" versions of them i'd be more than willing to use them. they don't have to actually be shooting, just glowing or something. here's how ebay gives feedback stars, so i'd only need one for each of these colors

Yellow Star = 10 to 49 points
Blue Star = 50 to 99 points
Turquoise Star = 100 to 499 points
Purple Star = 500 to 999 points
Red Star = 1,000 to 4,999 points
Green Star = 5,000 to 9,999 points
Yellow Shooting Star = 10,000 to 24,999 points
Turquoise Shooting Star = 25,000 to 49,999 points
Purple Shooting Star = 50,000 to 99,999 points
Red Shooting Star = 100,000+ points

a blank or white star for people with less than ten would also be nice.

Thanks for the sniping explanation Any more info on the fallacies? I mentioned above that I don't use eBay much but so far sniping seems like an interesting way to bid. Since I like freeware, I decided to do a minor update to the stars. I added a white/gray star. If you want I can make it white white but it loses any highlight/shadow. I very minorly tweaked the colors to push them more in the direction of the colors used on eBay, but they aren't at all direct matches. I also created two different shooting stars, one with gray streams, and one with light blue (matching the eBay stars). I also created a semi-glowing look:


Shooting stars with gray streams


Shooting stars with light blue streams


Glowing stars

I wasn't really sure which way the streams should have pointed, either to the left or more towards the ground but I figured you probably wanted to conserve some space if you wanted to use them. Anyways, I look forward to seeing your app evolve

Originally posted by iOliverC:
God yes, I don't think Sherlock supports co.uk. One question about sniping, what if another user is 'sniping' the same item, who wins?

The one with the faster connection Oh and the seller too; I remember being quite happy when my PowerBook sold for an additional hundred dollars or so in the final minute.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by iOliverC:
One question about sniping, what if another user is 'sniping' the same item, who wins?

Obviously depends on who has the highest bid; however, most sniping places I have seen have a "buffer" zone, meaning how close you want the bid to be placed before the auction closes. I normally choose "3 seconds"...however, any closer and you risk not getting the bid in time!

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Synotic:

Shooting stars with gray streams


Shooting stars with light blue streams


Glowing stars

Very nice work!



And oh yeah, I have thought of yet another name for this app:

eBayEssentials

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Synotic:
P.S. I'm admittedly an eBay newbie, and this probably isn't a good thread for this but could any eBay user explain to me something about bidding? When an item has a few bids and is listed at being "$5.50", what does that mean exactly? I understand the idea of proxy bidding, where perhaps I'll bid $20.00 on the item which was before $5.50. Will it still be listed at $5.50 or perhaps something slightly higher? Because I know it won't list it as $20.00. Does it just keep it at $5.50 until someone finally outbids me, say with $25.00, and then it'll list it as $5.50? Sorry to derail your thread, but this is just something I never got

I'll give this a stab!

If an item starts at $1.00, and you have eBay User "1", "2", and "3" bidding on that item, this is how it will normally go:

User "1" bids $1.50:

Now, at this point, eBay has minimal increments depending on the starting price. In this case, I believe the minimum increase would be $0.25 making the next bid have to start at $1.75, are you with me?

Now, User "2" decides to bid $20.00 on this item. The auction will now state that the price is $1.75 and the next minimum bid by somebody must be at least $2.00 or higher.

Now, User "3" decides to bid $25.00 on this item. At this point, the eBay auction will state the current bid price is $20.50 (based off a new increment price of $0.50 due to the higher cost of the item going up) and the face that User "2" bid $20.00 on this item.

That's the sum of it.