A couple of niggles

[Simon]

Hi,

I've just discovered Gixen and am impressed - especially with the price.

Previousy, I've used my own program to snipe, and while this works well, it's a desktop application, and so far from ideal when I'm away from home. So Gixen looks good.

One concern. You say passwords are only stored on gixen.com for a couple of days after the auction ended, but while they are stored, are they encrypted? Plain text storage is a security risk that will cause a lot of people a lot of pain if the bad boys ever succeed in hacking your site. It might be a small risk, but the consequences are horrible. Please reassure me the passwords (and usernames?) are encrypted while stored.

GDM.
This is a great way to use Gixen, but...

Multiple accounts. My wife and I have separate accounts on our XP machine. GDM stores the ebay username and password in an ini file in the application folder, which means that if we both want to store our usernames and passwords, we need to keep and use our own copy of GDM in separate folders. Not ideal. It would be better to store them under the user data folder, or in the user hive of the registry.

Validation seems to be all performed on the server, when simple validation at the client could give a much more responsive experience. (For example, is the entered bid amount a positive number?)

And a completely unimportant niggle, but a pet peeve of mine... the dialogs are all resizable, with sizeable borders, and minimise and maximise boxes. As I said, completely unimportant to the function, but it grates. Easy to fix in RAD Studio, just set the forms' BorderIcons and BorderStyle properties.

Keep up the good work, and thanks for making Gixen available!

[mario]

Simon, it was a deliberate decision not to touch registry or user directories. In your situation (two users) I can see how this would be more convenient, but I really like the simplicity of this. Since GDM is small in size, having two directories is not a major inconvenience.

I agree about validation. I will see what I can do to improve this, that's not too difficult to do.

Passwords are encrypted, but for obvious reasons this is reversible encryption. What kind and how I do it I will not discuss.