Examining tooling

 I've recently been reading back over my own blogs to get a better idea of what I was doing, as well as consuming a bit of EVE trade media to work out what other people are doing (notably Croda and Oz_eve on youtube) and what has struck me most about what I was doing was the sheer inefficiency of it all.

I have my trade spreadsheet in OpenOffice which I create and update manually by logging into each character, and typing out their buy/sell order totals and wallet balance. 

I haul my own goods.

I do not use market analysis tools much to select what items to trade.

I do not accurately track what is selling well in order to weed out what isn't.

The list goes on really. All of this contributes to my trading time taking much much longer than I would like it to, which in turn contributes to burnout.

On my commutes and downtime I've been thinking about what I would like to do or change about my current setup, and this is the list I've come up with so far:

• Use a tool to pull my assets and populate my sheet for me
• check out manufacturing
• start paying hauliers to haul my goods for me
• look at getting back into tash-murkon
• investigate other hubs e.g. frarn, stacmon
• Use a tool to tell me what I've sold and where

I've a software developer by trade, have been for a number of years now. Specifically a backend developer. So while there are some excellent tools out there to help with some of this, I think for the sheet population and accounting I can create something that will cater to my exact specs, and allow me to collate all my info with a click of a button.

Last time I was playing, I did make a start on a desktop app written in Java. Java is my speciality so doing the data manipulation in Java is easier for me, and as I don't current plan to host anything a desktop UI is fine for now. All I managed at that time was to get a basic app going that would log you in to EVE and get basic character info. Fancy.

Last night though I revisited this and added a tiny bit more, adding a button to print out a characters market transactions and another to test if I can get auth for several characters at once working, which I could. So I can print out the character info for several characters at once both on the same account and on separate accounts. This means I should be able to do all my top level sheet data collection with a click of a single button, which is very nice. 

The one remaining thing is to work out and test the auth token refresh mechanism. Auth tokens only last 20 minutes and I don't want to have to login with every character every time I want to get my info, so I'd like to see if I can utilise local storage and keep the auth tokens and just refresh them when I want to retrieve data to save all the logins. If I can I should have a neat little local tool that saves me a ton of time and removes human error from the equation.

Here is the sexy UI at the moment:

You can tell I'm a backend developer!