the official unofficial homepage for Bamidele O. Shangobunmi

Design History

The Options Evaluator, 1994-95

This project for a family member was a program from to run technical analysis on stock and stock index options. Begun in C (compiled in Borland Turbo C 1.5) and later converted to C++ (compiled with Turbo C++ 3.0), OptEval ran in DOS at 640x480 resolution with 16 colors. Lacking the funding to procure a rich GUI library, I was left to build everything from scratch, including mouse event handling at the assembler level, window management, and 3D effects.

Elements such as menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes were drawn with rectangles, lines, and pixels via the very basic Borland Graphics Interface (BGI) toolbox. Certain raster-based details such as mouse cursors and the animated scroll bar buttons were drawn on graph paper and then translated into character arrays representing hex codes for the color of each pixel.

Thumbnail (click to zoom in)	Comments
	Splash screen.
	"Open" screen featuring scrollable & non-scrollable lists, spinboxes, text inputs, checkboxes, and buttons in a modal dialog.
	Typical MDI (multiple document interface) chart view.
	Choose a color for a new technical indicator plot to add to an active chart.
	Indicators could be overlaid over the core data graph, either sharing the chart's scale or using a secondary scale, or they could be plotted on up to three separate scales below. Clicking a point on the chart would highlight the date, display indicator values on the chart's status bar, while all underlying data points and calculated indicators for the active chart display on a persistent toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
	Selecting an overlaid indicator to delete or configure after hiding the separate indicator pane.
	Confirming parameters of a stock index option to attach to the upper graph.