Project #1: Eve-Online Trading Tool

Eve-Online is an online game set in space. If that doesn't sound like your thing, don't worry, Project #2 is going to be a beautifully-simple tool for software developers. Maybe #3 will be a novel, or a rose garden. Who knows?

Edit: One year on, here's the latest revision of NavBot! If you'd like to read about why I wrote it, please carry on...

There are several trading tools for Eve, and none of them are particularly good. Here's why:

1. They can't export the market data for fifty different items for me while I get a cup of tea.
2. Some of them require me to share my market reports with the rest of the internet, which means any profitable routes attract immediate attention from other traders.
3. They don't find the best routes - specifically they don't seem to aggregate items of the same type but varying prices, which gives them an artificially-low volume and means the most profitable routes can stay at the bottom of the list split into half a dozen different trades.
4. They ask the wrong questions and give too many answers. There are two important questions that any budding trader might have, and neither needs me to browse through combo boxes or interact with HTML lists. I'll come back to the questions later.
5. They're not individual enough. The most profitable route for me depends on the amount of cargo space my ship has and how much money I have to spend. It also depends where I am. A good trade finder needs to take all of this into account.

What does it do?
There are two kinds of trading in Eve. You can either speculate on the market by placing lots of buy and sell orders - buying when something is cheap and selling when it is expensive - or you can cart things from A to B - buying where something is cheap and selling where it is expensive.

This tool tells you which items you can take from A to B to make profit as quickly as possible.

More specifically, it answers the two most common questions I ever have as a trader:

1. Which are the most profitable trade routes for me right now?
2. I'm at A and am going to B; can I make a profit on the way?

The form of the answers is not necessarily trivial, nor can it always be a simple ranked list. For example, when I ask to see the most profitable trade routes then I also want to know how far they are away from where I am now, and whether they are in high-security or low-security space. I need to see both, because perhaps this time I'll decide it's worth the risk to make 400% profit. Maybe I'm keen to travel half-way across the galaxy to get to a really profitable area or maybe I'm happy here because my corp headquarters is nearby. These are interesting, even fun choices to make. This is called the game. The algorithm can play at Excel, but I want to be the one playing spaceship captain!

Instead of putting up more details now, I'll put up the first release and you can see what I mean for yourself.