We wanted to take a moment to thank our customers and supporters for the past year, as well as give you feedback on where we have been, and are planning to go as a business. In the past year SciChart has experienced 60% year on year growth, and we have some exciting plans for the future. Read on to find out more about SciChart – The Vision and Roadmap – for 2017 and beyond. 

Investment in the Future

After starting business as a consultancy in 2010 and subsequently developing SciChart, by late 2013 we published a Vision for our company for the future, and in 2014 we published that we were experiencing strong sales growth in the face of declining market share from competitors. We continue to see that growth materialise with strong double digit growth figures (60% year-on-year gross sales in 2016) even in the face of very strong opposition, and as a result, we plan to continue investing in research & development of our charts. It’s time to update you on what we plan to do over the coming years, to ensure that SciChart remains a strong competitor in the market of Realtime & High Performance Charting Components.

Releases Happening in the Next Quarter

SciChart WPF: Strongest Business Area in 2016

SciChart WPF remains our most successful product. Pretty much, 90% of our business comes from the WPF (Windows) platform at the moment, and we anticipate this won’t fall below 80% for at least a year.

As a result WPF is our strongest growth area and where we are investing the most in new technologies and improvements to the SciChart WPF Charting library.

In 2016 we added 3D Charts to our WPF Charting Suite, as well as Ternary Charts, and Pie and Donut Charts. In 2017 we don’t intend to slow down innovation and development of our charting library for WPF, with several new features and chart types out very shortly.

So, below we go through the releases happening in the next quarter for SciChart WPF, iOS and Android.

SciChart WPF v5 (Q1 2017)

SciChart WPF v5 is coming soon. We have done quite a bit of work to improve our already awesome WPF Charts and the next major version (expected in the next 3 months) will include the following:

SciChart WPF Waterfall3D Chart

• Considerably faster realtime 3D Point Cloud / Scatter Chart. Up to 10x faster.
• Considerably faster realtime 3D Point Line Chart. Up to 7x faster.
• New Uniform Heatmap 2D Chart type. Up to 10x faster for the special case of realtime uniform heat maps.
• Support for PaletteProvider in 2D Heatmaps (custom cell colour overriding).
• New 3D Waterfall Chart Type, for viewing area/slices from a 2D array data series, displayed in a 3D Chart. Both realtime and static versions of the chart will be provided.

SciChart WPF DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis

• New DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis type. This is a special axis type, specifically for financial / trading charts, which will allow you to skip ranges (overnight, weekend). It will support series with differing lengths for the first time in trading charts. This opens the possibility of all sorts of indicators and filtering techniques previously impossible with SciChart. It will allow you to use Range, Tick, Volume or Time based bars. It preserves the position on Annotations on time-frame changes. It allows showing/hiding of overnight trading on exchanges with extended trading data.
• New Radar Chart type. This 2D Chart will be added to SciChart WPF to allow displaying radars with customisable axes and selectable series or data-points. This chart type has been built from the ground up using our fast 2D drawing technology and looks great!

SciChart WPF Radar Chart

• DirectX11 support for 2D Charts. No longer will our DirectX plugin use DirectX10, and no longer will it depend on D3DX9_43.dll/D3DX10_43.dll or outdated Microsoft technologies. It will use the latest DirectX11 and require no external dependencies (other than SharpDX), with automatic fallback to software rendering where DirectX is not available.
• Slipstreamed Visual C++ Runtime in the SciChart3D Library. No longer will end-users have to install the Visual C++ 2013 runtime to use SciChart 3D. This will be embedded in our charts.
• We are hoping to add (still working on) nulls or custom cell colouring in 3D Surface Meshs as well as a number of other improvements in the API and charts of SciChart WPF before the version 5 release.

SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 (Q1 2017)

Also expected in the next few months are version 2.0 of our iOS & Android (mobile) Charts. We have done a considerable amount of work to unify the two platforms, resolve differences in API and improve capabilities. The next version of SciChart iOS/Android will include:

New Themes, Logarithmic Axis

Stacked Column, Mountain Charts

• Stacked Mountain series
• Stacked Column Series
• Stacked Mountain (100%) Series
• Stacked Column (100%) Series
• Logarithmic Axis on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Gradient Lines on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Error Bars on both iOS+Android platforms
• Bubble Charts on both iOS+Android platforms
• CustomAnnotation on both iOS+Android platforms
• Dashed Lines on both iOS+Android platforms
• Vertical/HorizontalLineAnnotation on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Inertial Scroll on both platforms.
• ThemeManager support and custom themes on both platforms.

SciChart iOS Dashed Lines, Stacked Column Charts

• Unified API. SCIFastLineRenderableSeries API on iOS will equal com.scichart.FastLineRenderableSeries on Android etc..
• A set of tutorials to get started on both platforms!
• SciChart Xamarin Chart Binding Libraries. These are already published as Alpha and are being worked on as we speak.
• We are researching NativeScript bindings to allow you to use SciChart iOS & Android in this exciting hybrid platform.

We intend to release SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 soon (end Q1 2017), although, Xamarin is really hard. I mean, creating a binding library for our charts has taken nearly half a year, as we fought through several Xamarin bugs, and we weren’t expecting that. Fortunately once the library is created, making applications with the Xamarin components should be easy