Multiple Issues with GS7

[sgodun]

(GS7.0.7 on El Capitan.)

I’ve been a GS user for years and I’m very sad to see that longstanding issues that I reported to iwascoding years and years ago still exist, while the fundamental usability of the program has diminished especially with this latest version. I’ve only used GS7 for about two hours so far and I’m already pining for the return of version 4. So without further embellishment, if anyone can suggest fixes or solutions for these issues I would appreciate hearing about it.

1. GarageSale continues to make terrible HTML, especially after you’ve done some editing during preview. DIV tags are sprinkled around like salt on peanuts. I’ve taken to writing all of my descriptions in TextWrangler, then copy/pasting the completed text in a new GS listing, then doing limited formatting. This works, although if I ever have to do more extensive or repetitive formatting I need to start over from the copy/paste part or else suffer through DIV-heavy HTML. Basically format-editing is useless in GS, unless there’s something I’m missing.
2. GS still has trouble with bulleted lists; I reported this to iwascoding back in version 4, I believe. I type my description in, then go back and select a block of text, click the “bulleted list” button, and suddenly my ENTIRE listing is bulleted for some reason. I strongly suspect this is a byproduct of the bad HTML that GS generates since this issue almost never appears after I do a “clean start” copy/paste job as described in #1 above. All those DIV tags that GS generates is clearly screwing up the lists.
3. FTP support took two steps forward and one back. Good job allowing multiple FTP accounts/servers to be configured. That’s nice. But how do you assign which FTP account is assigned to which ebay account and/or ebay listing? If I have two ebay accounts and two FTP accounts, there appears to be no way to tell GS that Ebay Account #1 uses FTP Account #1, and Ebay Account #2 uses FTP Account #2. You have to go into Preferences and manually change it each time.
4. On the subject of FTP support, previous versions of GS allowed FTP connections that lacked multiple connection support. GS7 seemingly does not, as evidenced by my inability to use my FTP host which lacks multiple connection support. I am guessing that this is the reason why, every time I try to post a new listing through GS7, it generates an “Error while uploading (56): Failure when receiving data from the peer.” Every FTP client I’ve used, as well as shell FTP commands, has the ability to toggle single/multiple connections, so why not GS? (Some cynical part of me wonders if it’s perhaps just coincidental that single connection support was removed AND iwascoding now offers a paid subscription hosting service.) There also doesn’t appear to be a way to manually export the images from a listing so they can be manually uploaded, which would be a kludgey but at least serviceable workaround.
5. Previous versions of GS had the very helpful ability to highlight ebay options that would result in additional fees. GS7 lacks this feature. Why?
6. I created a new group, but I cannot rename it by any obvious means — double-clicking, right clicking, or locating a menu option to rename it. I similarly cannot rename previously-made groups. Why?
7. Every auction item I had created prior to GS7 was set to prevent bidders from any country outside of the United States. After “upgrading” (ahem) to GS7, every single one of those items is now set to allow bidding from every country across the world. Why?
8. Multiple picture support in item listings is counterintuitive and inconsistent. If I’m in Editor Mode I can only drag-and-drop an image in the space between existing images which will rearrange the images, but if I’m in Preview Mode I can only drag-and-drop an image on top of another image which will swap its position. Why isn’t this consistent and intuitive? Drag-and-drop a picture on top of a picture to swap them, drag-and-drop a picture on the space between pictures to rearrange them — regardless of which mode you’re in.
9. Why don’t variations show up in Preview Mode as they would appear on an actual live ebay listing?

Curious to see what the community and/or iwascoding has to say about all this. Perhaps if I’m able to actually post an auction I’ll have a better experience to share, but since I’m not able to do so (because of the FTP single connection issue) I’m pretty much screwed at the moment.

[Steve_Elliott]

I am led to reply. Most of us love the program. 2 hours is not long enough to learn a program. Also, some of the things you mentioned can be resolved by thoroughly reading their excellent manual.
Also 7.0.8 is the latest version.

Hope things work out for you.

Steve

[sgodun]

I agree, two hours isn’t long enough to learn a program. Fortunately I’ve been using GarageSale for more than a decade — including reading the manuals — so I’m perfectly qualified to make the observations that I did.

[kristian]

Hi sogdun,

I can’t answer all your questions but these are my comments:

1. As far as I can tell the text formatting is done by webkit and changing the way it generates the HTML is nearly impossible/very limited. However, in my experience the produced HTML is not that bad - at least when you only need to make basic edits.
   It might be that for you an external HTML editor works better though - especially if you need a lot text formatting. Maybe you can get better results if you switch to Markdown language in GarageSale’s Editor mode?

2. I just created a bunch of listings and the list option always worked great for me. Not sure why it doesn’t work for you. I type some lines of text, select it and hit the list button in the text formatting toolbar.

3. For me this sounds like a very special feature request? Not sure if other users miss this advanced feature, too.

4. I don’t know why you get this error, unfortunately. However, as far as I know GarageSale 7 does not use “multiple connections”!
   You still can switch to EPS or GarageSale’s free image service in the GarageSale preferences > eBay > eBay Images. That’s better than not being able to list at all.

5. GarageSale supports 20 different eBay sites. All/Many of them offer different paid options. Many of these paid options are free under certain circumstances. Reflecting this in GarageSale would be very challenging, I guess. However, all paid options should be shown in the listing fee panel in Launch Control.

6. You can. Simply select the group, then make a short click on the name and wait half a second.

7. You need to check your international shipping options. It seems you have selected shipping destinations there.

8. I don’t see why this is a bad thing. It’s the nature of each mode. In Editor mode the images have their own field where you can place images wherever you like. In Preview mode you don’t have that field. Instead you have to drag images on Drop Zones or already added images. Sure, it should be possible to show a prompt each time letting the user decide how the dropped image should be handled?

9. You currently get a nice overview of your added variations and variation attributes. We shouldn’t over-complicate the view in my opinion.

Hope this helps,
Kristian