MyCoins gadget

MyCoins gadget screenshot
As of 14th February 2019, third-party service that is used for fiat exchange rate (target currency field) has changed licensing terms. Please download updated gadget if you're using target currency field and create target currency API key.

Monitor any currency exchange rate

MyCoins is a Windows gadget (Vista sidebar or Windows 7) which displays two values: the amount you want to observe, and an estimated value of that amount in your preferred currency.

This gadget is for traders, hackers and tweakers. For power users. You can start with any fixed value, add or subtract one or more values fetched from HTTP response, and multiply it with another value fetched through another HTTP response. You can even use your completely custom calculation provided you know how to express it in Javascript. For those who wanted to change default currency label in MyBitcoins, MyLitecoins or MyNamecoins gadgets—in MyCoins you can. Download now It's free!
(though donations are appreciated)
MyCoins gadget config screenshot

Features

You can specify any source or exchange which has JSON API. The only thing you need to know is URL and JSON keys.

Configuring exchanges and sources

This gadget needs to be configured before it can be used. Let's say that we want to observe the Linden dollars (L$ or SLL) to Bitcoin (BTC) exhange rate. The best exchange for this is VirWoX exchange. We need to dive in developer documentation for VirWoX Basic API to find out how to build the query which turns out to be: http://api.virwox.com/api/json.php?method=getBestPrices&symbols[0]=BTC/SLL. This returns the following response:

{"result":[{"symbol":"BTC\/SLL", "errorCode":"OK", "bestBuyPrice":"2857", "bestSellPrice":"3039.1"}], "error":null, "id":null}

Assuming we're interested in selling Bitcoins and buying L$, we need to monitor "bestBuyPrice" JSON value, which is the current best offer to buy Bitcoins. Lets run through the options that need to be set for a second:

  1. In gadget options, let's choose trading presets and click apply. This configures the gadget to check rates more often (once a minute). Please be mindful to use as little resources as possible, so use mining presets (which set larger poll interval of 10 minutes) if you don't need quick updates. Also, most exchanges cache ticker data so there is no point in checking more often, while other block IPs which poll too often.
  2. Under general section, main currency label is BTC.
  3. We want to set correction in currency to either 1 if we want to see just the exchange rate or the amount of Bitcoins we want to trade if we want to calculate how many L$ they're worth.
  4. For primary exchange URL, we need to enter query URL: http://api.virwox.com/api/json.php?method=getBestPrices&symbols[0]=BTC/SLL
  5. Exchange rate JSON key is "bestBuyPrice" (without quotation marks) as we concluded above.
  6. Ticker currency is SLL (or L$ if you prefer).
  7. Now all that's left is to click OK button and apply the new settings.

Changes

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If you find this gadget useful, you can support it by sending any amount of BTC to the following Bitcoin address: 17T2ci9UwmF77PZJvuRtVryjmHwcwKN8yH