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.

Good news everyone.  We finally got finished with Auction Sidebar Tool v2.9 and it has been uploaded to Windows Live Gallery.  Primarily, the purpose of the new version was to fix the connection issues everyone's been having.  Couple this with the recent fixes I put out on the server and hopefully everyone will be connection issue free now. 

Download now or read on for what's new and improved.

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'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.

Recently, we were contacted by the owner of a popular voucher codes site in the UK.  They were interested in having a Windows gadget to display the latest voucher codes from their RSS feeds.

The gadget has been on Windows Live Gallery for about a week now, but I wanted to discuss some of the non-standard features we implemented to make it stand out from other RSS gadgets.

The most obvious feature you'll recognize is the advertisement at the bottom.  This isn't a feature you'd normally see in one of our gadgets, but was specifically requested by discountcodes.co.uk.  We did our best to make the advert as unobtrusive as possible, taking up just a small portion of the gadget right at the bottom.  The advert image and link will change around every hour.

My personal favourite feature is the scroll bar (probably because I wrote the class for it).  This isn't currently on our other RSS feed gadgets, they (and other RSS gadgets I've seen) split the feed up into pages with left/right buttons to switch pages.  I think that a scroll bar improves user interaction with a gadget, mostly because you can use the mouse wheel and up/down keys to quickly find the information you're looking for.

The third feature I wanted to bring your attention to was auto-scrolling when idle.  This means when you don't interact with the gadget, after a short period of time it will scroll a small amount.  The gadget will continue scrolling at short intervals until you interact with the gadget once more.  The obvious benefit to this is that you can periodically glance at the gadget and it would show you different parts of the feed at different times.

Other, standard features in this gadget include docked & undocked sizes, a search box linked to discountcodes.co.uk's site search and a short preview avaiable in undocked mode.

Anyone who would like to take a look can head over to the gadget's page on Windows Live Gallery.