eBay Desktop surpassed a significant milestone earlier this week with the 1,000,000th download since the launch in late February. eBay Desktop has surpassed even the most optimist projections (mine), more than doubling the number of projected downloads at this point post-launch. Just think… there are now more downloads of eBay Desktop than there are residents of San Jose!

I wish I could send thanks to whoever number 1,000,000 was, but I will instead extend my virtual thanks to that anonymous downloader (as well as extending my thanks to the other 999,999 as well). We have lots of great enhancements to eBay Desktop in the works, so stay tuned…

-Alan

To celebrate the mid-year point, I’ve just published a patch release for eBay Desktop: 1.0.6. This version has the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, plus one frequently requested feature: a title and description search option! Now, just like on the eBay website, you can search both the titles and descriptions of items to get the widest possible set of items that match your searches.

To install this patch release, simply open up eBay Desktop. After a few moments an upgrade message will appear.

Note that this version of eBay Desktop requires Adobe AIR 1.1. It should install seemlessly if you don’t already have it installed, but just so you know what is going on I thought I’d mention that.

Enjoy!

-Alan

eBay and Adobe are organizing on a small, informal research study on eBay Desktop in the next few weeks. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, use eBay Desktop at least occasionally, you are a candidate! All participants will be compensated for their time.

If you would like to participate, simply reply to this post — I’ll see your response in the comment queue and I’ll then follow up with you personally.

-Alan

eBay Desktop version 1.0.5 is now available. This patch release has a number of bug fixes, security enhancements, and one very frequently requested feature: a prominent link from each item page in eBay Desktop to the corresponding page on the eBay web site.

To upgrade, simply open eBay Desktop and after a few moments you’ll be prompted to install the most recent version.

Here are the release notes for eBay Desktop 1.0.5 in their entirety:

    Fixes logout process so all user data is cleaned up on logout
    Allows text selection in feedback portion of bug report window
    Adds a link to view each item in the browser in the item view
    Adds improvements to the logging console
    Changes image-to-disk caching strategy to improve security
    Stored personal data is encrypted for additional security
    Main window can no longer be restored after logout (until login)
    Adds item validation to improve security
    Improves thumbnail rendering algorithm for smoother list scrolling
    Fixes feeds buttons shifting right when a new feed is created
    Fixes sort arrows in search column headers

Enjoy!

-Alan

We had some issues with search in eBay Desktop today (5/16). These issues are now fixed, and you should be able to use eBay Desktop normally without having to take any further action.

Gory Details:

You may have noticed today that searching returned no results for queries that should normally return results. Because of an API change that rolled out this morning, the way that we have coded the search interface in eBay Desktop started interpreting every search as a “local-only” search. Once we identified the cause of the errors, we rolled back the change to the API. Coincidentally, we were already planning to issue a patch release today with a number of bug fixes and small enhancements which would have fixed the problem too, but since we were able to roll back the API changes the patch release isn’t required for search to work again.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know there was a problem! These reports are very helpful, and when we start to see multiple reports of a similar issue come in that is a sure sign that something is wrong. If you haven’t ever reported a bug in eBay Desktop, look for the “Submit a Bug Report” link on the bottom left of the Home screen.

-Alan

I have spent the last week or so going through over 1,500 feature requests and bug reports from you, the eBay Desktop community. First, I want to thank you all for writing in with your thoughts, and I welcome you to keep them coming — use the “Submit a Bug Report” link on the eBay Desktop home page. In the message it is helpful if you include your email address so I can follow up with you directly. Otherwise I have to use eBay member to member messaging, which is time consuming both for you and for me. I promise to be more responsive to issues — we have worked hard on tools that help me manage the number of requests.

I am glad to say that there are no critical bugs that seem to have been missed with the 1.0 release. There are bugs you have reported that we will continue to work on, but the fact that there was no 1 standout issue reported by multiple users was encouraging.

As for feature requests, there were a few requests that were made over and over. Here are 5 of the requests that have emerged as some of the leaders.

Selling — By a wide margin, this is the number 1 feature request for eBay Desktop. Many of you wrote in asking in particular for the ability to view a list of all of your listings, to know when items have sold (through either popup or audible notifications), to respond quickly to questions from buyers, and to take simple actions on your items sold, such as marking them shipped. Some of you want an easy way to list items through eBay Desktop as well, and the clear consensus seems to be that you envision eBay Desktop as a simple, quick selling tool, not something that competes with TurboLister or other “professional” listing tools.

I have always envisioned selling as being part of eBay Desktop, and I will continue to make the case within eBay that this is the right thing to pursue. You can make your voices heard — I encourage you to be vocal (especially at eBay Live) in explaining to eBay employees and executives why you want a better tools for selling, and how you see eBay Desktop as offering such a tool. Some of the best ideas at eBay have come from the “bottom up”, and with your help we can get a great selling tool in eBay Desktop 2.0.

Image and Text Zooming — Many of you requested the ability to see larger item images, and larger text on the interface in general. The next version (tentatively set to release in a few months) should have image zooming, so that with 1 click you can see larger pictures without taking you away from the item page. We are also working on improving the overall options for enlarging text, although full customization of text size may not be complete in the next version.

Worldwide and Multi-site Search — We need to offer users ways to easily search in more than 1 country — be it worldwide search, EU search, or search by manually selecting certain sites. We will work in the next version to offer at least the capabilities of the eBay web site, but we also have the opportunity to do far more than is possible than the site in this area. For example, we are considering having the ability to specify feeds as being specific to 1 or more countries, instead of being tied to the current country selection within eBay Desktop, as they are now. A large part of the current work we are doing is to support non-English languages within the product interface. First up is German — both because that is the largest eBay market outside of the US, and because the loooooooong German words help us to expose what areas of the interface need tweaking to accommodate larger bits of text. Other languages will follow — both French and Italian are high up on the most requested list.

Better My Messages — Our current My Messages implementation isn’t good enough. Plain and simple. What we tried to do was present an item-centric view of your eBay messages, where we show the item and the messages attached to it, but it is clear that this approach misses too many types of messages. It also seems that many users simply don’t understand how the Messages system is supposed to work.

So, the solution is clear: scrap the current interface and try again. I am sure we can come up with a simple, useful, and fast way to work with your eBay messages. I will work with the eBay Desktop designer (his name is Greg) on some interface ideas, and I’ll share them with you on this blog to be sure we are going the right way.

Improve Scrolling — Lots and lots of you wrote in requesting that scrolling work better within the interface, both for search results and for the item view. Many of the requests also noted that mouse wheel support is spotty at best, and that “two finger” scrolling on the Mac is particularly jumpy and annoying. We will work with Adobe on these issues… some of them can be fixed quickly in eBay Desktop, while some may require changes or improvements to AIR. But it is clear that this is an important consideration for many of you, and we will prioritize it highly.

Any comments on these 5 feature requests? Feel free to comment here, or to write in via the bug report/feature report tool within eBay Desktop. And thanks again to the hundreds of you who have written in so far.

-Alan

The 1.0.4 patch release to eBay Desktop is available. Simply start eBay Desktop and after a few minutes you’ll get the friendly update message. You may notice (if you haven’t already) that Adobe AIR will also kindly ask if it can update itself to version 1.0.1. Remember how much life sucked before software updated itself?

Here is what is changed in version 1.0.4:

• Fixed “Invalid Postal Code” errors when searching. This bug affected some non-US users who were unable to search using eBay Desktop.
• Adds improved logging. (The log console can be opened by entering Cntl + ~ ). This should help with debugging future user issues when they occur.
• Fixes update process so only the most recent update is installed and all others are discarded
• Fixes watching bug so that items ending in more than 25 days can now be added to the watch list
• Search category filter now resets when a search is initiated from anywhere but the search canvas
• Selecting items in the Home footer now behaves correctly
• “x more…” indicated for keywords now updates when the application is maximized

The new “eBay Ink” blog, written by Richard Brewer-Hay, launched mere minutes ago. The blog was previewed in a Fortune Small Business article recently, and the comments are already starting to flow into the blog’s posts (including one by yours truly).

I’ve met with Richard informally a couple of times in the past few weeks. I think he’ll do a fantastic job — he has blogged for years and previously worked at PodShow, which gives him significant industry cred.

So I suggest subscribing to eBay Ink if you enjoy debate and discussion about eBay issues; especially if you don’t have the personal fortitude to wade into the eBay Forums.

-Alan

I’m sure you’ve heard radio advertisements that go something like this: “Reason number 52 to switch your auto insurance to Flyco* blah blah blah“. What happened to reasons number 1 - 51? They don’t exist, do they?!? I hate that. OK, maybe I have just been subjected to too much advertising, but I resolve not to make the same mistake here. And so, on to eBay Desktop tip number 2:

Tip 2: Use the Add/Remove related keywords feature to help narrow down your search

Any time you do a search, “related keywords” appear in the “shelf” area above the search results. These keywords are derived from the actual listings that match your search. Notice the plus and minus icons next to each keyword? Click on the plus to add a keyword to your search (which will narrow it down slightly or a lot depending on how many listing titles have that word). Or, click the minus icon to exclude that word from your search.

In the example above I searched for ipod nano. A bunch of accessories come back in the search along with players, but since I’m interested in players, I exclude the keyword “for” (I could have excluded “case”, “silicon”, “leather”, or other commonly used words in accessories listings. Excluding “for” captures the most though). When you click the add button, a keyword simply gets added to the search. If you exclude it, though, it gets prefixed with the “-” symbol, which is the way the eBay search system knows to exclude it. If look closely, you’ll notice a quick animation showing the keyword move from the shelf area up to the search box. Spiffy, huh?

If there are many unique keywords returned, you can click the “more” link to see an expanded list. The keywords most commonly found keywords are listed at the top of the list, and you can also see more keywords by making the eBay Desktop window larger.

With a few clicks, using the related keywords feature helps you narrow your search so that it contains only the kinds of items you are interested in. The response from eBay Desktop users thusfar is that this is one of their favorite features, and if you haven’t been using it, give it a try!

Granted, this is more of a “feature highlight” than a “tip”, but it is such an important feature that I felt it was worth highlighting. And I write the blog and can do as I please. So there.

-Alan

* Any resemblance to an actual insurance company with an amphibian mascot is on purpose.

The newest patch release is out. You should see an auto-update prompt the next time you launch eBay Desktop. There are lots of bug fixes in this patch, plus one really nice UI improvement:

• Fixes a bug in message parsing that could cause an infinite loop (this issue affected some users, who would experience an application “freeze” upon loading the app.)
• Messages sent to sellers now appear in the item view immediately
• “All Time” feedback scores for sellers are now shown correctly
• Fixes a bug that caused user’s preferences to be reset if they signed out before exiting
• Category browser and feed selector now scroll smoothly (this is the nice UI improvement)
• Item prices are now always shown in the currency they are listed in
• Feeds can now be created from searches from the search item view as well as the search list view

Hopefully this will be the last patch release for a while — it fixes all known serious issues. Of course if any new issues are identified we will fix them and supply another patch.

And although it is St. Patrick’s Day, we denied ourselves any celebratory beers until after the patch release was out.

-Alan