Retail Auto Auction / News: Recent posts

I decided against releasing a 2.0 as the changes haven't been radically enough in my mind to warrant a large version number increment. Instead, 1.2.0 was ready, but never got released here. In the interm, many changes and improvements have been made and I encourage you to check them out.

Also, visit the home page... Some new screenshots should be up a little later and perhaps some information concerning a couple of auctions where Retail Auto Auction will be in use.

Several PyQt issues have been resolved. First, we've got it compiled and running on all our machines. We're also looking at PyQt 3.0 and Qt 3.0. It would be very nice to move all the printing related code to Qt instead of using ReportLab to generate PDF files. We're still not sure when that will be completed, but it's being considered.
In addition, most of the production machines running this program were using PyQt 2.4 which had a memory leak associated with ListView items. After several months of trying to determine why our code was leaking, I installed PyQt 3.0 and the memory leak is gone. Very very happy :). This was most evident when editing in the whitesheets.
Next: We recently completed code that allows editing of transactions through the Transaction interface. This is a *good* thing, particularly for auctions of 400 cars or more. Searching is done by auction and lot number so retrieving a completed transaction is very quick. Also, the transaction interface calculates values when editing just like it does when adding. This means no more calculator while editing transactions.
Last item: I added a buyer history to the customer interface that shows number of cars and dollar amount purchased in the last year and for all time. This allows people handing out bidder numbers to easily see that they have a very important customer standing in front of them.... read more

Sorry for the lack of info the last two months... First, school started, and second we've had some problems getting PyQt to compile on one of our development machines. This will hopefully be resolved shortly, but until then, feel free to run 1.1.7... or better yet, run the newest version out of CVS. The CVS version contains only two known bugs at this time. One, backup of the database will not work as is.. Please contact me for a quick fix. Two, deleting a transaction through the whitesheets will not work properly if you have more than 1 page of transactions. Both problems will be fixed for the 2.0 release. Again, sorry for the delay and feel free to contact me personally if you find anything else..... read more

Finally got around to making a new release. This should precede 2.0 by a couple of weeks to allow time for bugs to filter in and get fixed. Lot of new features in this release.. Check out the changelog for a semi-complete list.

Finally...

This release should be very stable although it is lacking in documentation. If you have any difficulties getting it running, feel free to let myself or Kaleb know.

It's probably important to note that the database is currently changing structure as well. Provision for tracking which auctions customer have attended is in progress. I think we will probably have another release in the next 2 weeks with the new db changes. If you are thinking of deploying this for your own auction business, you might considering holding off a few more weeks. Otherwise, have fun!... read more

As I mentioned in the last post (didn't know only the subject showed up <g>), we need help with an icon, a splash screen, and even icons for buttons inside the program that would make it look nicer. Please let me know if you can help.

Greg

A release will be done before the end of the week. We need to check on new versions of some of the products that we use in this program, get the webpage up, and a couple other things.
If there happen to be in artisically inclined people watching the project, we are in desperate need of a nice icon and some sort of image for an intro screen. Please drop us a line if you can help.

Thanks,

Greg