Seeking Help with MAnalyzer Horizontal Grid and Button Gradients

[anon84]

Hello, just looking for some help on configuring the visuals of NT8.

First I am unable to see the horizontal gridlines on my market analyzer, so can someone tell me how to get these to show please. Or is it a bug? I defnitely need these as I use 8 colums with 30+ stocks which is making it near impossible to see which value lines up with which stock at a glance.

This issue also exists in properties menus. The category headers are the same colour as the background, and there are no horizontal lines so you can easily see which ui control matches up with each name. It's definitely a step back from NT7 in this area. Just right click a chart in NT7 and cick properties - category headers are a clear different shade making them stand out, and horizontal lines enable the user to instantly see which option lines up with what. I'm not going to be spending massive amounts of time in menus so this is more of an annoyance than a huge problem, just more of a design best practices type of issue.

Second thing I'd like help with is the gradients on buttons, they a litle too grey and don't include enough of the base colour. After some searching I found you can edit all this in the skin files, however on opening the blueprint file of my new skin I was faced with a hundred matches for 'gradient' and many of them have the word button in. Can any expert enlighten me which I need to change to affect the chart trader buttons?

From looking at the values I assume they are Alpha,R,G,B. is this right?

It would of been great if the creators had made an easy editing screen for all this. Simply a screenshot containing near every ui element. You could then click on areas and a colour picker would come up, enabling very easy changes without having to hunt for each specific value in a large text file and edit by hand.

I whipped up an image of what exactly I am going for. I wouldn't mind it without a gradient either, but hey, I am open to some beautification. The blue button has a flipped gradient which I would likely prefer, but I believe I can work this out myself by reversing the offset values (just a guess at this point).

Thanks to anyone with the knowledge to help with these issues

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

Hello anon84,

Thank you for your patience.

For the colors on the Market Analyzer, please right click in the Market Analyzer > select Properties > got to Colors and ensure it is completely visible and then take a screenshot and attach it to your response.

A window to edit the skins is something that has been suggested and I will forward your vote to the developers.

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

The colors can be set using HEX in the Skins files: http://www.color-hex.com/

[anon84]

Hello again Patrick. Screenshot attached. As you can see, no horizontal grid lines!

Thanks for the website suggestion. So is there no way but trial and error to find which value will change that button gradient?

Thanks.

[anon84]

Through some testing I managed to find a hacky workaround to this bug. See attached screenshot which applies a gradient brush to the Market Analyzer background.

The green example is just to show what effect it has, the bottom part shows fake horizontal grid lines created by making a gradient brush with very tight stops to simulate the hard black edge of a line.

For example:

<LinearGradientBrush x:Key="HackedInGrid" EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0" po:Freeze="true">
<GradientStop Color="#FFFDF5E6" Offset="0" />
<GradientStop Color="#FF000000" Offset="1" />
<GradientStop Color="#FFFDF5E6" Offset="0.99" />
</LinearGradientBrush>

This bug will definitely need to be fixed by release, you can't expect average end users to have to go in and edit text files just to get something as absoloutely basic as horizontal grid lines on a table.

Nice app for making gradients in the XAML format: http://www.markbetz.net/sl/gradient/

[NinjaTrader_DaveI]

Hello,

We intentionally removed the horizontal grid lines in all data grids throughout the platform, including things like the Control Center tabs in addition to the Market Analyzer, to enhance the visual appeal of the UI. I will log a feature request for this, so that we can begin to track user demand for adding in horizontal grid lines. (SFT-1003) Thank you for your suggestion.

[anon84]

Hello NinjaTrader_Dave, thanks for the explanation even if it is somewhat shocking.

There can be no doubt that some kind of horizontal guide, be it grid lines or alternate shading of rows aids in the readability of tables as their width/number of columns increases. It was therefore shocking to hear that a deliberate design decision has been made to make the UI less user friendly in this regard.

With NT8 being in beta for many years already I hold no hope for changes, but at least there is a hacky way around this problem. The ease of readability is clearly an issue when you get to over half dozen columns with a dozen or two rows of symbols. I imagine in testing such a scenario was not considered, as when you have only 3 or so columns this isn't really an issue.

In my usual NT7 Market Analyzer setup I have 3 of the 8 columns set to display their data in bar format to enable easier and quicker visual processing. I like to have these columns quite wide on a separate monitor just so each column has more resolution to display its values (if you get what I mean). Such a setup would only exacerbate the current readability problem due to the fact that with no horizontal visual guides the ease of readability naturally decreases as table width increases.

As I said, there is an inconvenient hacky solution for this so it's not so much of a big problem for myself anymore. I'm more thinking of other users who probably aren't going to want to be Googling how to tweak such a simple feature and edit obscure text files with custom gradient setups. An end-user experience such as that doesn't seem to be a good impression to send out to potential customers.

Ending on a positive note, one thing I will say is I am loving the speed of NT8! After spending several hours converting my indicators (which need to run on several thousand bars of tick data due to requiring accurate bid/ask/trade values) I found they now load instantly versus the 3 or so seconds in NT7. This makes a huge difference to usability when switching between various symbols via a linked Market Analyzer window. Speaking of which, the Market Analyzer seems to load indicators blazingly fast also, it's always so painfully slow in NT7 so I am loving that improvement.

Edit: Last comment.

I just wanted to add that I appreciate you making the ticket for the issue Dave, but with the extremely limited (I'm guessing) number of NT8 users I don't expect you are going to get enough people complaining about lack of gridlines before release. Also given the fact that most users are probably futures traders (due to the lower financial barrier to entry) their Market Analyzers, if they even use them, will likely only contain a handful of rows with some contracts and major indices. That's a scenario where the lack of gridlines is very much a manageable issue, so again, I'm not expecting many complaints.

Just because this will likely only affect a minority of users doesn't mean the option to customise that aspect should be completely withheld. I can understand if we were talking weeks of re-coding for some obscure feature, it wouldn't be worth it, but lets be real here this is probably just hard-coded to transparent somewhere and would be trivial to change.

If the lead UI designer is so insistent on maintaining his/her vision then they can simply make the horizontal grids transparent by default. Problem solved! everyone wins! except maybe for the programmer who lost 5 minutes implementing the menu option.

No reply necessary Dave, I won't be bumping this thread since the issue is 'solved' and now only time will tell if it gets improved. Now NT8 is pretty much perfect except for my only remaining issue with the button gradients, I'll wait until the next update to comment on that again.

Product is looking good so far. See you in a few months

One final edit: Forgot to mention, being able to set different backgrounds for both odd & even rows would be the best option for readability and allow some beautiful looking tables. Basic horizontal gridlines are the next best option and 100% superior to the non-existent lines we have now however alternate shaded rows allow your eye to instantly correlate row data on the far right of a table with its coresponding title on the far left.

I understand thet alternate shaded rows may be impossible to implement if the row numbers aren't exposed in the WPF code, if they are though then this should be another 5 minute job.

Simply 2 UI options: Background for even rows. Background for odd rows.

The text may be a bit wide for the UI so these could be enased in a new sub group group called "Background Colours". Expand that group in the UI and it then reveals the two new options "Even rows" & "Odd Rows".

Conveniently this complies with the 'No horizontal grids" design rule that NinjaTrader_Dave mentioned, so in the end everyone should be happy. It's hard to argue against at least adding some form or horizontal visual aid whether grids or alternate shading, given the large tangible benefit versus the tiny amount of programming required.