ACME Auctions 1.0: View eBay Auction Status on Your Smartphone

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.smartphone.net/smartphonethoughts/software_detail.asp?id=373' target='_blank'>http://www.smartphone.net/smartphonethoughts/software_detail.asp?id=373</a><br /><br /></div><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/animated.gif" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><br />"Download auction information onto your Windows Smartphone and track your eBay finances from anywhere! Using your phones GPRS connection, ACME Auctions downloads auctions you are buying and selling and displays them in an efficient and easy to read manner. Avoid having to scroll around Internet Explorer and having to wait endlessly for your data to load!<br /><br />• Track active and completed auctions (up to 7 days) <br />• Intuitive and easy to view interface with no scrolling <br />• Color coded auction information makes it easy to see which items you are successfully bidding on or selling <br />• Auction Statistics allows you to track your total finances for completed and active items. <br />• View bestselling items, worst selling items and track your finances in a bar graph format! <br />• Work online through your phones GPRS connection or through a USB connection to your computer <br />• Network Statistics Dialog shows you how much data you've downloaded to make sure you can easily keep track of all kilobytes downloaded <br />• Downloads your auction data with compression to help speed loading times and avoid lower total kilobytes to download!"<br /><br />I'm on eBay a fair bit myself, both buying and selling, so this looks like a killer application for me! Nice and affordable as well. Kudos to Acme Auctions for coming up with this.

[Mike Temporale]

Nice work ACME.

When I first read this I was a little concerned that they might have built this by screen scrapping (or HTML parsing) as I was unaware that eBay had a API available. However, a little snooping around on the eBay site turned up this: http://developer.ebay.com/DevProgram/developer/api.asp

Way to go ACME! What a great idea. :D

[jeffreymcmanus]

Unfortunately these dudes didn't use the eBay API, it looks like they are in fact scraping HTML. So users of this app had better be prepared for it to break every two weeks, since that's how often eBay changes HTML on the site.

[Jason Dunn]

Unfortunately these dudes didn't use the eBay API, it looks like they are in fact scraping HTML. So users of this app had better be prepared for it to break every two weeks, since that's how often eBay changes HTML on the site.

Really? Ouch, that sucks. :cry:

[Mike Temporale]

Unfortunately these dudes didn't use the eBay API, it looks like they are in fact scraping HTML.

How can you tell?

[jeffreymcmanus]

Developers who license the eBay API (http://developer.ebay.com) will display a logo to that effect on their Web sites.

http://developer.ebay.com/DevProgram/images/T_CertDev_logo_md.gif

[Mike Temporale]

Wow. Didn't realize it cost money!! And with these prices (http://developer.ebay.com/DevProgram/membership/services.asp) there is no way they can sell it for only $7.95

Your right, it's a safe bet that they are only screen scraps. Too bad. Very cool idea.

[jeffreymcmanus]

It's actually free to get started writing apps using the eBay API. The pricing that you probably saw was for commercial applications (typically apps that make thousands of calls per day). If you're an individual it's possible to develop your own application that uses eBay very inexpensively.

[Mike Temporale]

Acording to the prices I linked to above, an Individual license is allowed 50 API calls per day, and has a Certification Fee per application of $100.

While that's not a lot of money, I don't know that I would consider that inexpensive. :wink: