Trading software for OSX

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#1 Thu, Sep 8, 2011 - 4:44am
silverbleve
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Chico, CA
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Trading software for OSX

I would like to post some free software I have been using to do a few different things related to trading in the hope someone else might like these as well. Sorry if you have a pc this is mostly os x stuff but some of it may have pc versions. There are a few I want to post but I'll start with the desktop charts.

Basically I want to show real time charts of Gold and Silver on the desktop so I can get the movement at a glance, I use the 3 -day kitco charts mostly because I want to see the movement in relation to what market is open at the time geographically, but you can use whatever charts you want, this is just an example.

Here is the sauce for downloading the program, its called Geektool, and once again it free! :

https://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/index.php

And here is a quick tutorial on how to use it for showing charts. It could be used to show a lot of different things actually but I really just use it for charts.

Once you download and install, click the System preferences:

Geektool will be an item in the preferences pane like so:

Clicking it brings up the preferences and settings for your desktop, since we will be adding an image to the desktop, just click the icon labled image and drag it to the desktop:

A shaded area will pop up and a new preferences pane just for that image.

Notice in the pane that pops up the field labled 'URL' thats where we need to paste the address of our image. The image will be retrieved from the internet at time intervals we set, but we'll get to that in a minute, first lets pick a chart to be the desktop image. For a demo, I'll get a new chart from this site:

https://finviz.com/futures.ashx

Scrolling down to the bottom of the page I get this chart, which I originally found via DPH (thanks man!) and I do occasionally check out anyway.

I right click, or ctrl click, or two finger click if you have a multitouch trackpad and select 'open image in new tab' or the equivalent in whatever browser you are using, here I'm using chrome.

Now we click the new tab that opens, and we have the image all by itself, without all those other images and text, this is the URL, we copy that text up at the top there like so:

And now we paste that text into the URL field in the Geektool preferences pane we opened earlier:

Voila, the chart appears on the desktop, although it will be small and not in a good position. Up in the corner there:

So you drag it around a little and resize it using the circular button on the image itself, and then once you have it big enough and in a spot on the desktop you are happy with you might as well mess with the opacity, which is a slider bar directly under the URL field we pasted into earlier, and you have something like this:

You should also notice the text field 'refresh every' which is the number of seconds you want your charts to update at, I set the kitco charts to 3 seconds, but since this is a daily chart I figure we might as well set it to a longer time, perhaps even 1000 seconds.

Now just close the preferences pane and system preferences window and the chart stays in the background on your desktop behind everything.

And your done! Whew, that was a lot of copying and pasting!

Edited by: silverbleve on Nov 8, 2014 - 5:27am
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