Browse eBay the Sailfish way with Markat
It took more than one and a half year for this to happen, sorry for that. Also there is still no possibility to place bids, best offers or to order items directly in the application. But this is definitely still planned and the most important task for Markat 0.8.0.
Yesterday, on Monday 9. May, not only Sailfish OS saw a new release (2.0.1.11 Taalojärvi), but also Markat, the unofficial eBay client for Sailfish OS, hits the Jolla Store in the new version 0.6.0. This was 18 month after the last major release of Markat. Before going into the details and write about new features and stuff in Markat, I want to say thank you to two people for their efforts in translating and testing Markat: Carmen F. B. for her complete Spanish translation and paliako for his complete Italian translation and for testing Markat before releasing the new version. Thank you both very much!
Markat 0.6.0 has an almost completely rewritten API part that should make the API requests more reliable and error tolerant. Also it makes the implementation of new API calls much easier and integrates better in the QML/UI part of the application. To give some imagination of the amount of changes that happened, here are some code statistics: 418 new files, 414 commits, 776 changed files, 122,115 insertions, 39,385 deletions.
Some calls have transformed to other API parts, like the displaying of a single item that is now handled by the Trading API instead of the Shopping API. This leads to the requirement to use Markat connected to your eBay account, because this API part requires authentication. Data from My eBay, like lost and won lists is now stored in a local SQL database, together with your local stored recent and saved searches. The pre installed SQL databases also contains meta information for every eBay market place and the top and second level categories. All the rest will be requested from the API by demand.
Beside this code reorganization the visible part got some changes, like the search filters, that now resides in an attached page to the search results. Filters should now be more reliable and search results are automatically reloaded when you changed something and swipe back to the search result lists. To have more information about a seller, the complete transaction history for an user is now accessible.
Especially for the German market place in some categories the energy efficiency class is now displayed in the search results.
While version 0.6.0 was in Jolla Store QA I finished version 0.7.0, that fixes some crashes and brings some new features (sorry, no buying). It was send to Jolla Harbour today and should hit the store in the next days.
Biggest task for the following version is the ability to place bids and buy stuff in the application, as well as bring back the ability to use Markat up to some point without authenticate it to your eBay account.
You can find more information about Markat here.
