SciChart: Roadmap for 2019 | Fast, Native Chart Controls for WPF, iOS, Android and Xamarin

February 11, 2019

This year we have a lot of exciting releases planned. We have been working very hard behind the scenes on research & development to improve our existing set of products, plus create new products. This work is often hidden from view but we want to give you an insight into what we are working on and when we hope to release!

SciChart – Achievements so far

We last published a roadmap two years ago and discussed how its our intention to become market leaders in cross-platform, high performance real-time charting. That was an ambitious plan for a small, privately owned company like ours without any external funding or debt! However, we are well on our way to achieving it. Here is a run-down of what we’ve achieved since the last roadmap update.

2012 – 2016

Oh wow, this is how the website looked in 2012!

We were just getting started really, during this time we went from zero (just a guy with a laptop) to a team of about 7, releasing versions 1, 2 and 3 of our WPF charts.

It’s funny to look back at those days and realise how bad our graphic design was!

April 2016

WPF 3D Charts were released in 2016

We released SciChart v4 which included WPF 3D Charts. The 3D Charts have been extremely successful and are used by companies all over the world to carry out complex, hardware-accelerated visualization of data in 3D. This work also pushed us into the position of Market Leader for High Performance WPF Charts, pushing us past our main competitors in volume (number of licenses sold).

Summer 2016

iOS/Android Charts v1

We released a first version of our iOS/Android charts. SciChart for iOS/Android was performance tested vs. various competitors and easily became the worlds fastest iOS & Android Chart component (ios performance tests, android performance tests). Pretty soon after we had a success with one of our customers using SciChart Android on an embedded system to create a medical testing device.

Summer 2017

Xamarin support was added in v2 of SciChart iOS/Android

We released version 2 of our iOS/Android Charts. More chart types, a better API and more examples. Xamarin support was added. The demo applications were added to the app store and play store.

In 2017 we also completed a redesign of our website including Why-SciChart pages, Case-Studies and a reviews campaign, netting us a whopping 242 reviews with 98% positive to date!

Throughout 2018

SciChart WPF v5 continues to be improved

Several releases of SciChart WPF v5.x, which added contours in 2D & 3D, filters API, DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis, Market Profile series, Radar Chart, Extreme Resamplers & performance improvements, Free surface mesh, 3D Polar chart, 3D Ellipsoid chart, 3D Cylindroid chart, and Financial trade annotation drawing tools.

You can see a list of the release notes here:

In addition, we released hundreds of bug fixes & minor updates via our Nightly Build / NuGet feed, and have also been working very hard to move more of our chart code to C++ (the original cross-platform language) to allow us to complete our vision. These sort of things you don’t see but are a huge piece of work required to make the next steps possible.

SciChart – The Roadmap for 2019

The coming year looks set to be packed with releases which will include the following.

Just Released (now)

We just silently released a documentation update for all our three platforms. Find information more easily with improved google search results as well as a cleaner, easier to read theme. Also the Forums now have an auto-search function which has already helped reduce the number of duplicate questions!

Releasing in next 4 weeks

SciChart WPF v5.3 is in testing for release very soon, which will include Animation Functions on series, ability to rotate Polar charts natively (a many times requested feature), and option to avoid Tooltip Clipping when many charts close together (another hotly requested feature) plus many reported bug fixes.
SciChart iOS v2.5 will be released very soon with a patch to support Metal as well as OpenGL ES for the latest iOS devices.
SciChart WPF v5.4 will feature .NET Core 3.0 Support, which is in progress now and we believe will be ready before the Microsoft release of .NET Core 3 for Windows Desktop Applications
We are shortlisted for a major award which is being announced in just over a month! We can’t talk about it just yet but we are super excited (and crossing fingers and toes) hoping that we stand a chance of winning! …

Releasing in next ~2-3 months

SciChart iOS/Android v3 is nearly ready: a major version upgrade with a new improved API for iOS charts, and 3D Charts to both iOS & Android platforms.
We are rolling out a Features Request system on the website, allowing you to suggest features & vote on them. Vote power will be linked to your purchase history, so higher value clients will have more vote power. We will only be doing feature requests logged in the new system, so when it is released, get voting!
We are rolling out improvements to the Knowledgebase, search and support desk. These include closing the support desk to non-paid customers and ensuring that you are given relevant search results when you first request support.
We will be removing the lower cost, no-support option for our charts, instead, introducing multiple support tiers including standard and enterprise; which may include remote support, to add value to enterprise clients who demand the best and most effective support channels.
We will be releasing a new, cross-platform Licensing Wizard, written in Electron & React, it will work on Mac OSX and Windows desktops, allowing you to activate licenses, get news about updates and more on all our chart platforms.

Releasing later this year

Mac OSX support for our iOS Chart library. We have delayed this release for now as we wanted to focus on the re-work of our iOS charts to include 3D & Metal, but the code is largely portable. We aim to refocus on Mac OSX support soon.
SciChart.js: fast, realtime javascript charts using our C++ rendering engine ported to WebAssembly and WebGL to allow streaming, realtime 2D & 3D Charts for the web, Electron, React, Angular and Vue.js applications. This is a very exciting project which started recently. We have some early results that our charts will work in a browser and will be developing them over the course of the year.

A feature packed year!

Thank you for your continued support of SciChart. We wouldn’t be where we are today, without you, the customer. To say thank you, we have a feature-packed year planned for you!

Remember that if you are a customer of SciChart, you will receive all major & minor releases that fall within your support subscription plan. It makes good sense to keep up to date and to renew SciChart WPF, iOS or Android so that you get the latest releases.

If you haven’t yet purchased but are thinking about doing so, take a look at the above, we have come a really long way in a short period of time and we believe the best is yet to come!

As always, we welcome your feedback and comments. If you have something to say, good or bad, please contact-us, as it can help shape the business.

Best regards,
Andrew

Andrew

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