Wasted desktop real-estate and DOM a retrograde step

[brucerobinson]

Been familiarizing with 8 a while. Continually finding & reporting features I use in 7 absent in 8. Frustrating 8 has downgrades.
UI I find desktop real estate use efficiency to be worse.
First clip attached is of 7&8 DOMs side-by-side.
Note extra vertical height used & space taken up by inefficient menu which I don't want to see when I am in a trade and could be pop-up menus from a toolbar or similar
Look at the proportion of 8 DOM steelblue compared with 7 DOM green. Note I get 25 price rows in 7 DOM from top of DOM Window to MarketPriceMarket row, but only 17 in 8 DOM and it takes up more desktop total vertical space.
Because of the buttons at the bottom of the DOM I cannot Center price in both Chart and DOM and have them horizontally aligned (see second attach). If I shift the buttons to the side, it wastes even more space. The text in the DOM is fixed font, the 'padding' around the text is a waste of space (compare it with 7, no such waste)
I read or heard somewhere a specialist UI designer had been involved......
All I want to see **when I am in a trade** is the ladder.......
I'm aware I can change the font size inside the ladder (not the menu buttons and Tab text which is the problem), resize the Window etc and I can probably change Windows settings for the Windows text size but that's not really where the problem lies.
I thought the old DOM was bad enough with its many limitations but this is worse, IMHO

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

If I understand you correctly, you'd like the space surrounding the price ladder and other blank areas to be reduced?

[brucerobinson]

Hello Patrick and thanks.
Yes. The general principle I'm advocating is to use screen space as efficiently as possible wherever possible.
Comparing the 7 and 8 DOMs, the 8 DOM uses more vertical height to display exactly the same options of instrument, qty, TIF etc (only addition is the instrument search symbol) it is just less efficiently designed with larger text, the buttons are bigger than they need to be compared to the size of the text, there is wasted space above and below buttons etc. No benefit, just takes up screen pixels.
The 7 DOM has the collapse/expand button to show/hide the DOM Advanced options. The instrument, qty, TIF etc could be shown/hidden in a similar manner perhaps, so that you can access them when you want to, but don't have to have them displayed taking up screen space when - in my case anyhow - most of the time I want to see the ladder and as much 'chart content' (not tabs, margins, etc)? 8 has improvements over 7 in this regards such as the Toolbar items in the Windows Header instead of as a separate Toolbar as in 7. But the User Option was there in 7 to display, or not, the Toolbar for exactly this reason - just display what you want to use to trade - contents of the chart most of the time and display the Toolbar if/when you wanted to access its functions if you want to use this option (some users may want to display the toolbar all the time, but the Option was there to hide it. Now, having moved the Toolbar into the Windows Header and saved space to display it all the time, we have Tabs taking up this space saved that can't be hidden......
Also (and this applies to the charts also) the Tab for additional charts is always displayed. this means that this vertical height is taken up by the Tab whether you want to have it visible or not, whether you want additional charts available through Tabs or not.
In the Control Center Window, there is an option to Show Tabs, or not, so that the Tabs do not HAVE to take up space in the Window. Clearly this is done so that you have a choice to display them when you want them displayed, and you don't have to have them take up Window space when you are not wanting to use them. could this not be implemented in both the DOM and Chart Windows?

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

You can enable and disable 'show tabs through the right-click menus of charts and SuperDOMs:

https://www.screencast.com/t/qv6uPx0xJjNW

I will forward your other suggestions to the Development Team as feature requests.

[autogenix]

Reducing space usage of the DOM would really be great +1

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

I've added votes to SFT-509. Please reference this internal tracking number if you ever have questions regarding this feature request.

When a feature request is implemented, you'll find it in the release notes:

http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt8/en-us/?release_notes.htm

[caveat_lector]

I strongly agree. Please add my vote.

NinjaTrader wastes lots of screen-space multiple ways. The developers could learn a lot by actually day-trading simultaneously in multiple markets with a competitive product like Thinkorswim. It was developed by traders and has a wonderful trading interface, but an atrocious user script language (which is my reason for interest in NinjaTrader). In contrast, NinjaTrader appears to have been designed by software developers with very little understanding about the actual needs of active traders. Its C# user programmability is wonderful, but the trading interface is primitive and naive. Not only should wasted space like brucerobinson marked in his screen images be eliminated, but it shouldn't be necessary to continually waste space displaying a DOM that is only used occasionally for a few seconds. Each chart should have small buttons along its edge that can be clicked to temporarily insert associated DOM, Level II, Time and Sales, News, and other windows during the short periods when they are occasionally needed. Clicking those buttons again should hide those windows and resize charts to reclaim the space.

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

Added, caveat_lector