Having been an early adopter of MC I am not sure I would buy into a new project. Actually, having paid early for the lifetime of the product its a little disconcerting for them to simply shelve the existing product and require all those early adopters that supported the development to pay again. No biggy I guess.
On the whole I like MC and most of the guys and girls over there are really helpful getting you sorted out. Having said that I do have some concerns. Their design goal seems to be to follow
tradestation as closely as possible for look and feel. For easy language thats great but for a lot of other things TS is hardly state of the art being based itself on supercharts that is positively archaic. I wonder about there design skills, there are few (if any) things that you think wow thats elegantly done. Over the years it has been a real uphill battle to get things fixed or simple changes made in implementation in a more trader friendly way. I don't think any one over there is a trader (though I may be wrong) compare that to say Laurence Chan over at Neoticker and there is no contest. If Neoticker had a more user friendly scripting language it would blow MC out of the water. It does anyway to be honest. I really don't think TSsupport have much 'vision'.
An intermingled point is that if they do finally accept something really neat and fairly simple to implement (this in itself is a struggle as they can be pretty 'defensive' when dealing with suggestions) it will take months (or more) before something finally shows up. There philosophy seems to be push on adding features (many of which seem of dubious value) simply to tick boxes. Once the box is ticked they move on to the next 'box' leaving a half baked implementation behind them. Fortunately they seem to be catching up finally and core functionality is reasonable. Actually there development does not seem to be that controlled. Development cycles are fairly long simple things remain unfixed for ages you get hints of 'clunky' implementation and architecture and old bugs sometimes reappear etc.
MC has turned into quite a nice product (though for me it was a painful journey) but starting again I find it hard to see how TSsuport will compete with some of the strong competition. For example Ninja only added charting a short time and a couple of versions ago they will probablly be on version 9 10 or higher before TSSupport have a new beta .1 At Ensign you make a suggestion to Howard and I have known stuff to appear in days. IRT they carefully watch whats 'hot' and it just shows up in there software. Neoticker will probablly do whatever you could possibly want right now with some programming due to its amazing architecture. etc.
Anyway MC is now a good product (imo) however over the years it has cost me a vast (vast) amount of time and a not inconsiderable amount of money. (One of the reasons for writing this). I think MC2 I will leave until at least version 3.0 before taking a look at it unless it has an absolutely must have feature.
07-29-2008, 04:04 AM
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