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Hi, I'm playing with the idea of writing my own trading frontend, specifically for Mac, since there is no platform with good UX and that is 100% native.
Does someone have any experience with this? I'm looking to start only with the DOM, and connect it to the R API, but seems there is no easy accessible docs anywhere, no blog or anything mentioning the api, so maybe this is too complex, too obscure, for even trying it?
Actually, R API would be a decent choice. I remember I looked into this some 7-8 years ago and at the time myself and another engineer deemed R API as the one with the clearest instructions for Mac OS integration among others. I remember they had some doxygen docs which were available on request... things might have changed since then but I imagine it should be mostly the same today.
Orc (now Itiviti) was another one that had very solid options for Mac support, including a (platform-independent) proprietary protocol and a native Mac frontend, but they're also probably too expensive for retail use.
As for writing your own trading frontend though, I presume when you say you're writing it for Mac that you're going to write a native Mac GUI. That is an enormous undertaking. I kid you not. I remember joking with a friend who owns a very reputable 500+ market making firm (probably one of the largest 10-15 in Chicago) that we can never get anyone to work on the GUI, and he has to resort to all kinds of tricks to get an engineer interested in working on GUI because they deem it as a career dead-end.
I had people on my team do it a couple of times. You're talking about 1 month of development time just getting the zooming, aspect ratio, and color mapping in a passable state.
I recommend you do all the write actions (order send) as well as major read actions (positions and order state) on the command line instead. Then if you really want a charting/display interface, you can still communicate between them using sockets, IPC or ZeroMQ and display the charts on a separate view-only application.
Yeah, I'm noticing that most GUIs on trading apps are horrendous like I can't believe I paid ~900usd for Jigsaw while looking like a turd stuck in the 90s. Now I understand why is it like this.
I'm a software engineer that enjoys frontend dev, but I'm also aware that this is a very complex undertaking
Jigsaw's UI looks really nice, but it's not really compact. Anyhow I think the UI is one of its big selling points. Personally I think the best thing about jigsaw is how the colors all go crazy on the tape when new highs or lows are being hit, but it's not really necessary of course for trading. But really trading is not about how nice a UI looks, Sierra chart probably won't win any awards for looks but it is a great platform.
If I was on a mac I'd probably just use Motivewave since it is java. It is tempting as a software dev to want to code things yourself but is it really necessary if you are going to do manual trading?
Functionality wise Jigsaw's UI, specially the dom is great, but still looks like software from the 90's. Look at Quantower for example, looks much more modern. Motivewave is the better offering on Mac yeah, but still has that Java smell , and their Dom is very basic. Dunno probably I'm just too picky because of my profession, but maybe I'm not the only one and there is space for a Mac focused trading platform who knows.
Just got access to the R Api stuff, it was just a matter of asking for demo to AMP.
I took a look at those two that you all named - Quantower, Jigsaw - and also it seems like BookMap is usually lumped in there.
Edit: On the topic of Mac, I should also add that the best trading GUI I've ever seen or used was implemented using Cocoa in Swift and does blow all of these wayyyy out of the water. It's also probably what I would use if I needed to write this as a native desktop GUI. If the ones you named are around $900, I would pay $200,000 for an annual license.
The unfortunate thing about all of these retail platforms is that someone popularized the level heatmap concept (I think it's Nanex) and since then everyone has been copying the idea without first asking - why do people need this?
I think this kind of thing is useful for unsupervised outlier detection (Chauvenet's criterion) for data cleaning or a one-off event study, but I haven't found this to be a useful type of plot for developing a strategy or live trading. Off the top of my head, I can think of least 20 different types of plots that I'd rather depend on if I needed to trade by hand.
people say Quantower is buggy. My guess is this is because it is relatively new. oh yeah Bookmap runs on mac but it is not a full-fledged platform. There are a few people who do really, really well with bookmap (in conjunction with their main charting platform) but for the majority of people I think it doesn't help them. Seems that it can be good for stocks as well.
