Monday, July 19, 2010

JoyBidder eBay Auction Sniper Free Edition is now Public at AMO

JoyBidder eBay Auction Sniper Free Edition is now Public at AMO. This is quoted text from the email AMO sent to last Friday.
Congratulations! Your nominated add-on, JoyBidder eBay Auction Sniper Free Edition, has been reviewed by a Mozilla Add-ons editor who approved your add-on to be public.

Since last year, I have been revising the Pro Edition to meet AMO guidelines, so that it can be approved to be public. I even disabled auto version update alert, since extension cannot do that if it is not approved public by AMO. Today, lots of users are still using 1.4.6 because they are not aware there is new version available. I was hoping once the Pro Edition is approved public, the auto update issue will be resolved. However, in the end, I was notified that because Pro Edition is a shareware, AMO will not approve it. This is a quite shock. It might be more helpful if I was informed of this a year earlier during the first review. Now with all my efforts, it hits a hard wall.

At the time, I almost want to give up, since the newly released Windows desktop version is doing well, and I am planning to work on Mac desktop version. During the same time, browser market is not looking good for Firefox. IE8 is bundle with Window 7 holds steady. Chrome is gain popular every day. More people are buying Mac with Safari as the default browser. Inside Mozilla, there is uncertainty among addon developer community as the development of Gecko 2 and JetPack.

After much debate, I finally decide to build a free version, this is how JoyBidder eBay Auction Sniper Free Edition comes into being. I consequently rename the shareware version as the Pro Edition.
Now the Free Edition is approved public, I feel I finally got a closure and will move on to other things I want to do with JoyBidder.

Here are some of them in the near term:
1. host Pro Edition on my own server, so that it can provide version update alert
2. release Desktop application for Mac