Industry Spotlight: Our Favorite thinkorswim® Makeover Tips

While the swan-like facelift we just gave to the thinkorswim^® trading platform is no longer news, we thought since you’ve likely been playing with it awhile, you might need a few highlights, tips, and answers to some of your “What the...?” or “Where did the little blue thingy go?” questions. Here are our three new things.

Beautification

Out with the black, white, and metal color schemes. In with a cool new trio: Dark, Bright, and Old School. The Dark and Bright themes also come with a high-contrast mode for maximized readability. This mode also shifts the hues most affected by red/green colorblindness. If you want to kick it old school, select that color option for the classic thinkorswim color scheme.

And have you noticed the overall calmer look and feel? The default chart and study colors have all been updated to be consistent with these new color schemes. These can all still be customized to your individual preferences. The control style on the trade ticket has been updated. Brightly colored items are static (to differentiate between editable and non-editable fields). Muted items can be edited via a drop-down menu. Items with a black/white background can be clicked to type in a value.

All of the icons in the platform have been updated, and they now scale properly with any changes to font size. And to boot, they glisten on Retina/HiDPI displays.

Usability

The left-hand sidebar can now be resized to any width. Just click and drag its inside edge to your preferred width to make the change. You can now change between color schemes and high-contrast modes, as well as change the size of the font, within the platform without restarting. We have updated to a new font, Open Sans, which is anti-aliased (fancy tech talk for having smoothed edges) for a smoother look and better readability. You can also switch to your system default font if you prefer it. And you can now change the spacing given to all portions of the platform to either maximize the amount of data displayed or make the data easier to read. Your choice. To access all of these, go to Setup > Application Settings > Look and Feel. There is now better distinction drawing in the platform between paperMoney^®, OnDemand, and Live Trading.

To access all of these, go to Setup > Application Settings > Look and Feel. There is now better distinction drawing in the platform between paperMoney^®, OnDemand, and Live Trading.

Modernization

The entire codebase of the UI was rewritten essentially from scratch to allow for more consistent performance and easier development of new features. Various components within the platform, such as the Dashboard gadget, now resize themselves adaptively to allow for proper representation no matter their dimensions. Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to the little blue dot thingy that launches menus—it’s been phased out.

All of its functions are available either in the Actions menu (marked with a gear in the column header on the right-hand column) or via the right-click menu.