Topic: Bitcoin Windows gadget which displays BTC and currency amounts - page 13. (Read 69295 times)

I find that I frequently have to change the 'correction' box as I receive BTC from sources other than the usual pools (alt coins), exchanges plus I might be buying and selling things

An alternative could be to enter BTC address(es), and then just add to them the 'unpaid' balances from pools

IE.
Wallet Contains 10
BTCGuilld Unpaid 0.5

Widget shows 10.5

If I then buy something for 5 out of the wallet it changes to 5.5

This way it always shows your net assets.

Nope both times are set to 10 minutes. Just now the gadget would not display any mining data even after 5 refreshes so I left it be. After a few minutes it finally caught on, but I bet it will again lose the mining data briefly soon. It's weird.

I hear you, I'm all for minimalism. But it's not meant to always be 1; miners will typically have different amount there, and I for example have two BTC gadgets, one with 1 BTC to monitor price and other to monitor my Bitcoin net worth (where I actually pull this number from Google doc spreadsheet which calculates my current holdings).

There's an issue with making it smaller (1-field) - there can be only two sizes for one gadget, normal and expanded, and expanded is already used for displaying 5 fields view. And displaying only one field on the current size might be ugly, though I'll have to try it - though it won't save any space.

You do make interesting suggestions and I'll think about it for the next version. I actually like the idea of displaying two exhange rates at the same time - now you have to either use expanded view or put two instances of the gadget on desktop, one for each exchange.

It's strange that you get changes between refreshes; that could indeed signal that it takes a long time to get response from one of the APIs, typically all calls complete during a few seconds. Also, check if both mining and exchange data intervals are set to ten minutes. If your exhange update interval is shorter than 600 seconds (10 minutes), it could be the issue with exchange.

Call me a minimalist but do I really need to look at that "1" in the labelled BTC field.  Its always "1". (of course) Why not make the gadget smaller by allowing it to be hidden? Alternatively,  I'd like to be able to configure the gadget to just show 2 fields, one for MtGox (latest) and another for BTC-E (latest) for instance.  Even if nothing changes with this gadget, it is already an excellent one.  (way to go!!)

These past few days the mining stats section has been behaving somewhat erratically.

It seems like the gadget is losing the connection to the API (BTC guild in my case) - the BTC amount will zero out several times during the 10 minute window that it's supposed to be refresh at.

Is there something going on with the BTCGuild API perhaps?

Thanks!

Thnx for update, much appreciated 

Yep. I've posted the update, please download the new version. This one is fixed by switching to MtGox API v2.

Sorry for slow update on this; it took me a while to crack this one. For technical details read on...

There was another undocumented change in behavior of MtGox API. The gadget automatically adds random number in parameter when calling exchange URL. This is needed since it's the only way to force IE (which powers Windows gadgets) to reload the page. However, MtGox is becoming more and more strict regarding parameters - first they added parameter validation, which I circumvented by using parameter with empty name. Now the empty name parameter is not accepted which forces me to switch to v2 API which is not yet officially documented, where this works. The constant MtGox API changes are however becoming a problem; I'm contacting MtGox to try to work this out with them and considering alternatives (such as switching to Blockchain API for MtGox ticker).

This is how gadget settings in Windows work; you can have multiple instances of the gadget on the desktop, and each has its own settings. When you close the gadget though, those settings are lost. I'd be grateful for a bit of input from you guys on this - especially with recent and constant MtGox API changes, is changing settings manually on each new version becoming a problem? What default options do you usually change in settings?

Same here for the last couple of days, it's strange as if I open up the URL https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCUSD/ticker everything appears fine, just not reading the data for some reason and I have no knowledge of JSON to know why.

EDIT:
Changing to https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCGBP/ticker works fine, must be something on the USD page

Seems to be working fine here, using the URL https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCEUR/ticker ...

It's not working again 

Thanks for the update!

One more thing though:

Not sure if it's just on my PC, but if I manually close the gadget and open it again, all my settings are lost and I have to re-enter them. In between reboots however the gadget can keep the settings which is a little weird. Is this a known thing?

Thanks for the update 

Hi all,

sorry for not updating sooner, was offline until now. Yep, MtGox turned off http API and started redirecting it to https, and IE which has to be used in gadgets unfortunately doesn't follow redirects. New version of gadget is available for download, but you can simply change exchange URL to https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCUSD/ticker

A few quick tips on API changes (and MtGox seems to change API pretty often). If gadget stops updating, you can force update by going to settings and clicking OK without changing anything. If you see N/A, then one of the URLs that are polled is not working - try loading them manually in browser to see which one. If you understand JSON you can also figure out if JSON changed and update accordingly and please feel free to post it here for others to see.

Gadget is completely configurable and should work with most APIs for precisely this reason, APIs change and exchanges come and go... and hopefully we'll see more people using alternate exchanges so that MtGox doesn't hold that much of BTC exchange traffic and stops being the central place for attacking decentralized currency.

Actually, let me give some settings for alternate exchanges (just change it in settings):

BTC-E
exchange URL: https://btc-e.com/api/2/btc_usd/ticker
exhange rate JSON key: sell
field 1 JSON key: sell
field 2 JSON key: last
field 3 JSON key: buy

Vircurex
exchange URL: https://vircurex.com/api/get_info_for_1_currency.json?base=BTC&alt=USD
exhange rate JSON key: lowest_ask
field 1 JSON key: lowest_ask
field 2 JSON key: last_trade
field 3 JSON key: highest_bid

Bitstamp
exchange URL: https://www.bitstamp.net/api/ticker/
exhange rate JSON key: lowest_ask
field 1 JSON key: ask
field 2 JSON key: last
field 3 JSON key: bid

Looks like the solution is to use https for the Gox API?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2090533

Dev was last active here on 15th april. Looks like we're screwed...

Hi,

did the Gox API change something again? As of today, the gadget is no longer able to fetch Gox values...

Thanks!

New update is available.

This follows the undocumented change in behavior of MtGox API which broke the gadget - MtGox started actively refusing rand parameter which gadget uses to make sure that MtGox response is not cached.

As a bonus, I've added a new note field to settings screen which you can use for anything you like. For example, in this field you can store the last date when you updated the correction amount...

ahh just what i've been looking for.. thanks!