eSignal's improvements

S

Samsara

I gave eSignal's marketing team a rough time last time they unveiled 11. Just gotta say, now that they've implemented a lot of the necessary features from 10.6 so rapidly, I've come around.

I've been learning Ninja in the meantime for an eventual migration, but I have to admit, eSignal's done everything right in my book with 11. Better performance, collapsible headings, the ability to hide price, drag studies into one another, tabbed pages, better chart menu setup, color-coded syntax editor, etc. It's all there.

I still can't get huge chunks of my code to work in 11 for backtesting purposes, but whatever. Building out the software from the ground up has turned out to be well played in the end.

Props where they're due.
 
Try drawing multiple price rulers on top of the price bars. There's no option to always keep them on top of price as you can from the v10 Properties... chart popup menu. Simple things like this which I depend on in real-time futures daytrading is keeping me with v10. I've been using eSignal for 8 years. They're not very careful about breaking things which already work so well in 10.

I understand that it's really v1.0 of a completely new code base but the new designers of that base obviously don't have the attention to detail that the old codebase had.

Hey, don't you miss that quick way of adding a study/formula to your chart through the right-click menu and it dynamically added the new formulas to your list if you added scripts during the day? It is so annoying the way they make you add studies in v11 now compared to that.

This is just my personal opinion from 25+ years of software developnent but I think it was a serious mistake to not leverage the Microsoft.Net programming world since they were rebuilding from scratch in the first place. You get so much for free building on top of that architecture.

I'll probably be using v10 for 2 more years. When you make your living trading the futures market and you're only interested in 2-3 main symbols, v11 isn't a good replacement yet. It's eye candy, not a great leap in functional design. Besides, v10 charts are far more attractive to me and the bar resizing algorithm they're using in v10 is perfect in comparison.

But, I understand that v11 probably is better if you're a stock trader looking over a lot of symbols to bounce around throughout the trading day.

eSignal and Tradestation are like large ships which take a long time to turn in a new direction. They are extremely fortunate that there is not one single visionary out there who really gets it from a software development level, integration lecel and real-time trading experience level who could summarily wipe the floor with them given the proper resources.

On a final whining note, don't you just want to puke when you see these small-time trading software outfits offer "lifetime licenses"? Uh, they're not referring to your lifetime. They're referring to THEIRS. Do you see in any small print which says, "in the event our company either gets bought out, goes belly-up or our "main dude" gets hit by a bus, we will distribute an unlock code to lifetime users which allows the software lifetime to exceed ours".

I don't miss not having a "real job". But THANK GAWD I have the programming ability to apply to what I want to have in my own trading!
 
Yeah, there are new frustrations that of course have cropped up. For instance, I like the ability to jump all charts to a date based on where you click on one, but when jumping back to the most recent date based on a chart click, most charts add like 20 bars of right scale padding, forcing you to then manually adjust each one.

As far as your other comments, maybe the following might help, though they don't completely fix your issues (and you probably know about them anyway).

Drawing lines on top of price: I don't know if you can permanently have other studies on top, but you can move price to the bottom of the study hierarchy from the Edit Chart menu, which now includes trend lines, so that all existing lines are on top. Doesn't help when drawing new lines though.

Adding new studies: try right clicking a chart that has the desired combination of studies -- Style Templates / Apply to Current Page. Very nice feature in general, though won't be useful if you have varying charts with different combinations. Alternately you can set default template on one chart & apply default template to the desired one. That's not a new solution though.

Quote from SteveH:

Try drawing multiple price rulers on top of the price bars. There's no option to always keep them on top of price as you can from the v10 Properties... chart popup menu. Simple things like this which I depend on in real-time futures daytrading is keeping me with v10. I've been using eSignal for 8 years. They're not very careful about breaking things which already work so well in 10.

I understand that it's really v1.0 of a completely new code base but the new designers of that base obviously don't have the attention to detail that the old codebase had.

Hey, don't you miss that quick way of adding a study/formula to your chart through the right-click menu and it dynamically added the new formulas to your list if you added scripts during the day? It is so annoying the way they make you add studies in v11 now compared to that.

This is just my personal opinion from 25+ years of software developnent but I think it was a serious mistake to not leverage the Microsoft.Net programming world since they were rebuilding from scratch in the first place. You get so much for free building on top of that architecture.

I'll probably be using v10 for 2 more years. When you make your living trading the futures market and you're only interested in 2-3 main symbols, v11 isn't a good replacement yet. It's eye candy, not a great leap in functional design. Besides, v10 charts are far more attractive to me and the bar resizing algorithm they're using in v10 is perfect in comparison.

But, I understand that v11 probably is better if you're a stock trader looking over a lot of symbols to bounce around throughout the trading day.

eSignal and Tradestation are like large ships which take a long time to turn in a new direction. They are extremely fortunate that there is not one single visionary out there who really gets it from a software development level, integration lecel and real-time trading experience level who could summarily wipe the floor with them given the proper resources.

On a final whining note, don't you just want to puke when you see these small-time trading software outfits offer "lifetime licenses"? Uh, they're not referring to your lifetime. They're referring to THEIRS. Do you see in any small print which says, "in the event our company either gets bought out, goes belly-up or our "main dude" gets hit by a bus, we will distribute an unlock code to lifetime users which allows the software lifetime to exceed ours".

I don't miss not having a "real job". But THANK GAWD I have the programming ability to apply to what I want to have in my own trading!
More...
 
Quote from shneed:

Anyone using Esignal, can you set up price alerts directly from chart windows?

thanks.
More...

Yes. Just right click a chart object.
 
Quote from Samsara:

Yeah, there are new frustrations that of course have cropped up. For instance, I like the ability to jump all charts to a date based on where you click on one, but when jumping back to the most recent date based on a chart click, most charts add like 20 bars of right scale padding, forcing you to then manually adjust each one.

As far as your other comments, maybe the following might help, though they don't completely fix your issues (and you probably know about them anyway).

Drawing lines on top of price: I don't know if you can permanently have other studies on top, but you can move price to the bottom of the study hierarchy from the Edit Chart menu, which now includes trend lines, so that all existing lines are on top. Doesn't help when drawing new lines though.

Adding new studies: try right clicking a chart that has the desired combination of studies -- Style Templates / Apply to Current Page. Very nice feature in general, though won't be useful if you have varying charts with different combinations. Alternately you can set default template on one chart & apply default template to the desired one. That's not a new solution though.
More...

So how do you add EFS formula's to a chart now if you can't right click and add them?
 
Quote from Runningbear:

So how do you add EFS formula's to a chart now if you can't right click and add them?
More...

You can though: right click / insert study. Or ctrl++
 
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