jinXplorer
The New Auction Listing Tool

by Geea

 

I am sure this announcement will rock the developers’ community without a doubt.  What we have all been waiting, praying and dreaming of is now here and it’s called jinXplorer.  This Auction listing tool was developed by SonBlock and will be released on Wednesday, June 1, 2005. 

Saturday evening I had the pleasure of meeting with Sonny to talk about his new baby and even got to try the application out for myself.  Let’s just say I have never looked forward to relisting my auctions as I am now.  It is user friendly, carefully planned out with no room for mistakes by the lister. 

The name of the application is jinXplorer, the nickname is jX  pronounced Jin_Ex or Jing_Ex.  I asked Sonny how the name came about.  The application is named after himself with Jin being part of his first real name and X – for Explorer.  The logo, in fact, was designed to imply it’s a “J-in-X” 

This application has been a labor of love for Sonny and has been in development for the past three months.  Creating this auction tool has been something he has always wanted to do.  There were many discussions about it during DAB and the development community has been asking for it.  I asked Sonny if any members were involved in designing this program.   While no members were involved with the actual coding and development, he did acquire the assistance of a few developers who had large auction catalogs, in order to beta test the application.  Jinx_TV, Kittenkat, Dreamweaver, Mercuria, Banshee_Kate and The Chaz were developers who were involved in the beta testing. 

The release this Wednesday will be Version 1.03, which will be available to download from the Son of There website: www.sonofthere.com.   

This application will allow you to list your auctions and categorize your items.  For example - if you have Christmas items you just assigned them to the Christmas Item folder you create.  You can search your auctions by category, all items or by items that the auctions have ended. When you log in to JinX, you can request a simple search or a thorough one.  It even has an option to remember your password so you don’t have to keep typing it in.  This application runs outside of There so logging into There is not required. 

Once you have signed in you will get a window which tells you how many catalog items you have, how many are currently in auctions and how many auctions will end in what period of time.  Cool right?  Well there is more.  When listing an item, JinX will attempt to list it three times before it will give you an error that it cannot be listed.  If you are wondering why it may not list, that’s simple, it’s either that the developer site is down or you’re trying to list something that has already been listed.  In addition to listing, it will give you a history of how many of a particular item has been sold.  It also shows the breakdown of the wholesale price, profit price and how many days are left on your auction for each item.  If you have a logo associated with an item, you will be able to view your logo in the Auction Option window.   

This program has a great layout and is easy to use.  The top half of the window is a listing of your items with auction item names, auction pics, auction ids, wholesale price, retail price, copies sold and days left on the auction. The bottom half, which can be minimized if you prefer, has three tabs: Item information, Auction History and Auction opinions.    You can list multiple items at one time.  During beta the most items that were listed at once was 154.  That is not the cap on multiple listing, only what has been tested.   

So what more can you ask for?  Well, I asked Sonny if there would be a report generator.  That is in the plans and I’m sure you will see that option in a future version. 

Sonny has done an amazing job and the developer community will surely be pleased.  Thank you Sonny!