Update: We had a small hiccup with the build that went on Windows Live Gallery but this has been fixed and re-uploaded. Sorry to anyone that downloaded the non-working version.

Auction Sidebar Tool 2.91 has just been accepted onto Windows Live Gallery and is now available for download.  This new release adds a few new features as well as some behind the scenes bug fixes and improvements.  New features in this release are as follows:

• Integration with the eBay Client Alerts API - this new feature allows us to connect to eBay's services more frequently and efficiently to update item and My eBay bidding, watching and selling list statuses.
• Basic list sorting - You can now right click and sort item lists by ascending or descending order based on item price, title or time left.
• New loading method for .NET extensions.

Read on for more information or download now from Windows Live Gallery.

Last night on the Auction Sidebar Tool support forum, a few users started a thread regarding issues they were having with retrieving feedback scores from eBay.  This problem is caused by Auction Sidebar Tool reaching an imposed daily limit on the requests it can make to eBay's Developer APIs.  This means you might be lucky enough not to have noticed the issue, depending on the part of the world you live in and the times of day you use Auction Sidebar Tool.  How do we know this is the problem?  Well, a few days ago I received an email from Zhuowei Yang, one of the staff at eBay Developer Support.  The email reported a large jump in our API requests and notified us of the restriction they were placing on Auction Sidebar Tool's usage allowances.

It's important to note that this issue will also affect eBay time synchronisation, so those users counting down the seconds for that final bid should be aware that AuctionST's time may not be accurate enough for sniping.

Read on for the contents of the email, our attempt to fathom the issue and our intent to resolve it.

It's been a while since my last post (almost three months!).  I apologize for this, I've been rather busy.

This post is regarding a security issue I discovered when researching methods of displaying third party websites within a frame in the gadget or a flyout window.  If you don't already know, Windows Desktop Gadgets are built on Internet Explorer technology.  They are actually mini Internet Explorer windows and are subject to the same security settings as Internet Explorer.  They run in the Internet security zone, just like websites that haven't been added to the trusted or restricted security zones.

Being in the Internet security zone, gadgets would normally be unable to perform certain tasks, like communicating across domains with web requests, running ActiveX controls or accessing the clipboard without first asking the user.  In order to get around this problem, gadgets force these settings to allow these actions to be performed programmatically with no prompting.  They do this for gadget, settings and flyout windows and any windows hosted within, including frames and inline frames.

An update to the National Lottery Results gadget just got accepted onto Windows Live Gallery.  This fixes the never-changing "Loading..." message that you might be seeing on all older versions.

Quite recently, Camelot Plc made some rather large changes to the National Lottery website.  The first thing I did was tested the gadget to make sure it still did and it worked fine.  Alas, it seemed they weren't finished with the site and they later changed the URL for the draw history downloads, thus breaking the gadget (the nerve!).  It was pretty tricky to find the new URLs, the draw history links on the new site are the same as the old ones and produce an error.  Luckily, Google helped out a little bit.

I sincerley apologise for not picking up on this quicker.  I imagine my tests were a day or two early otherwise we could have had this fix out a couple of weeks ago.  Many thanks to Stephen and Roy for the necessary kick up the back-side!

I also tidied the code a little, if any developers or would-be developers are taking a look.

Update: Stephen got back to me to mention that he could no longer choose which game results were displayed.  This was my fault - I messed up the settings page without realizing.  The great thing about this was I caught another bug; National Lottery had slightly changed the format of their draw history CSV files, causing the gadget to parse the 4th most recent result instead of the latest one (eek!).

Download National Lottery Results Gadget from Windows Live Gallery

A couple of updates sneaked onto Windows Live Gallery over the past few days, but I haven't had time to post an announcement until now.  So first things last:

The second of the updates was for Play.com Search, and went live today.  Nothing major here folks, Play.com terminated their affiliate program with Tradedoubler which stopped the gadget from working altogether.  We know there were quite a few users so we made the decision to update it.  The new version uses new links, and some behind the scenes code changes improve efficiency and Windows 7 support.

The first update was for Postage Calculator (UK), which has seen its biggest update since the initial release in October 2006.  Not only are the prices updated for April 2009, but it's grown by almost quarter of an inch to accomodate a new box and it's also sprouted international postage rate calculation and full keyboard accessibility.  Get the full run down by clicking the read link.

Download Play.com Search from Windows Live Gallery
Download Postage Calculator (UK) from Windows Live Gallery

The Amazon Sidebar Tool has had a small update once again to fix a fairly problematic issue related to purchasing items. It should all be perfect now though. Here's a list of what's changed:

 - Fixed purchasing items through the gadget
 - Support for mp3s added
 - Carts and search results now clear when changing countries

Download from Windows Live Gallery

The owner of discountcodes.co.uk got in touch yesterday to let us know that the gadget wasn't working.  Fortunately, he'd already done most of the leg work in finding out the problem.

It turned out that Feedburner, who were hosting the feed that the gadget uses, had moved all their feeds from http://feeds.feedburner.com to a new url, http://feeds2.feedburner.com.  They did set up a forwarding header to direct browsers and feed readers from the old URL to the new URL and in certain situations a gadget's request to a URL would follow a forwarding header.  Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those situations; a request from a gadget will not follow a forwarding header to a different domain or subdomain, it just stops completely with no information on which URL it should have been directed to.

Without being able to access the feed, all of the discountcodes.co.uk gadgets already downloaded are rendered useless.  We've updated the gadget to use the new feed URL and we have a method on how we can make a request that will follow forwarding headers to other domains, it just requires a bit more testing before we start using it.

 You can download the updated version of DiscountCodes.co.uk Latest Offers from Windows Live Gallery.

We have quite a few prototype/early development stage gadgets here and prioritizing them is a pretty tricky task.  Since there are a lot of gadgets out there, we prefer to focus on gadgets that haven't been done yet, or gadgets that we know can be better than similar gadgets we see out there.  Covering the first of those two criteria is our Magnifier gadget, whilst our Colour Picker (tentative name) tries to do something that's been done, but in a better (read: more convenient) way.

Both gadgets use our custom-built ActiveX controls to perform their main tasks.  For the non-technical minded; gadgets are quite limited in the tasks they can perform, on their own they don't nearly have the same capabilities of a full-blown application.  An ActiveX control allows us to even the playing field against desktop apps, whilst taking advantage of the gadget's small nature and constant desktop presence to beat them with convenience.

Hit the read link to find out more about these gadgets.

We've just updated Amazon Sidebar Tool to version 1.052 on Windows Live Gallery.  This update fixes a bug that appeared a few versions ago and affected viewing items from the Amazon US and JP sites. 

Hopefully, this will be the last of the bugs cropping up for a while but if you do spot anything please let us know in the comments or on the forums.

Download from Windows Live Gallery

With the release of Internet Explorer 8 RC1, a new bug appeared in Amazon Sidebar Tool.  The issue causes the gadget to render incorrectly, with most of the content being offset by a certain number of pixels.  For those of you wondering how a new release of IE could affect sidebar gadgets, the simple explanation is that gadgets are powered by Internet Explorer.

We've seen this kind of bug before, in early versions of both Auction Sidebar Tool and National Lottery Results.  However, the fixes that were applied to those gadgets did not work when applied to Amazon Sidebar Tool.  I must admit, I was a little worried that we'd have to go back to the drawing board (quite literally) to resolve the problem.  In the end, some tests run by Law and I resulted in us producing a fix and everything seems just fine now.

Amazon Sidebar Tool users can download the fixed version from Windows Live Gallery.

If you'd like to read more information about the bug and how to fix it (if you're a developer), hit the read link.