Updated Look with Some iPad Support for SharpCharts

In case you haven't noticed yet, we've updated the look of our SharpCharts Workbench page.  We think the new look is more modern, cleaner and more helpful for new users.  In addition, we've tweaked it to make the workbench a little easier for iPad users.  Finally, for many users there are a couple of nice performance improvements.

The updated look includes nicer visual boundaries for each area of the page and icons to make the important links easier to find and use.  The icons also allowed us to shorten are reorganize some of the links.

The great news is that for people that use Google Chrome, Apple's Safari and similar browsers, we were also able to decrease the vertical size of the upper area.  Not by a ton mind you - 4 pixels - but for people with smaller screens, every verical pixel counts.

Unfortunately, for people that use IE or Firefox, the verticle size increased by 3 pixles despite our best efforts.  If that is an issue for you, please see this blog post about ways you can optimize your screen.

As a side note, Internet Explorer remains a "problem child" for web programmers.  Even the latest version does lots of things "wrong" which we have to work around (and it gets way worse if you have an old version).  If you use StockCharts.com regularly with Internet Explorer, take a moment to try out either Google Chrome, Opera, or Apple Safari (which also runs under Windows) and see what you've been missing (i.e. faster load times and better looking pages).

We also made a change that should help people that use an iPad with our SharpCharts Workbench page.  iPad users will notice that all of the controls on the page are bigger than they used to be which should make it easier for you to use them with a finger-based tablet.

(Before you write in and ask, we still do not have any specific plans to create an iPad app.  Why?  Because it would look and work pretty much exactly like our website does now when you access it via Safari on the iPad.  Our general plan is to continue slowly tweaking our current website to make it more tablet friendly.)

One piece of feedback we've gotten from several people about the new look has to do with the repositioning of the "Forward" and "Back" arrows used for navigating your saved charts.  The arrows were enlarged and separated to make it more apparent what they do so that more people would start to use them (they have to this point been a fairly under-used feature of the page).

Several people have pointed out that it is somewhat more inconvenient to move your mouse over to the upper left to click the "Next" arrow.  While we agree, I want to make sure that everyone is aware of a keyboard shortcut that make clicking on those arrows much less necessary:

To instantly move to the NEXT saved chart in your ChartList, hold down the CTRL key and press the "." (period) key.  Note that the period key also has the ">" character on it which is why we chose it for "NEXT".

To instantly move to the PREVIOUS saved chart, hold down the CTRL key and press the "," (comma) key.  Note that the comma key also has the "<" character on it - thus it is the "PREVIOUS" key.

Hopefully that will help power users speed through their saved charts even faster than before.

If you have any feedback for us about these changes - either positive or negative - please enter it below.  I won't be able to respond to it all, but it will get read and considered.

We will continue to improve and evolve the website over time.  We've been doing it for almost 12 years now and we have no plans on stopping.  We appreciate everyone's input into that process and everyone can look forward to lots of addition improvements in the coming weeks and months.

Enjoy!
- Chip