Summary of NIWeek 2003 Mac gathering

Dear platform independent LVers,

Michael Aivaliotis requested a report about the out coming of the informal Mac gathering at NIweek 2003 so here is some information:

Generally I think all interested LabVIEW programmers working on the Macintosh who attended this years NIWeek were present. The meeting was publically announced and was open for everyone, therefore I assume that all those who really cared were there and I am not going into any details.

However, I would like to thank all those who took their time to participate, LabVIEW users and NI developers alike. I would like to specially thank Jeff Kodosky from NI and Lori Jennings-Emery from Apple for being there with us.

The gathering was in my opinion successful in the sense that it was a unique chance for an open discussion between a number LabVIEW programmers who still appreciate the Mac as a comfortable platform to develop wireworks at the same time honoring the heritage platform from which it all started to grow with the spreading of the PC.

We were reassured of NI's commitment allowing LabVIEW to run on Apple's future versions of hard- and software. Essentially the Mac is not expected to be a platform with an immediate commercial benefit but more as a digital biotope for cultivating new ideas and things which may become relevant in the future. It always has been that way and there is no reason why it won't in the years to come. Sticking to the Mac also means to stay flexible, generally open for new ideas and ways to do things differently. In some instances this means for a user to make sacrifices and say an early goodbye to certain well established technologies.

In a nutshell the users said:
Besides the already existing LabVIEW, LabVIEW-RT and VISA for MacOS-X we want at least a convenient subset of NI-DAQ, GPIB and IMAQ-Vision ported to MacOS-X as well. We also want LabVIEW itself to be better optimized to run on MacOS-X.

The developers responded:
Compile us a list of hard- and software needs to be able to narrow things down to a slim but still useful and therefore easier to handle subset of hardware and driver needs.

The principle results of the discussions were:
In a collective effort we users will gather information and will let NI know what we need. Because testing a product prior to its release remains a big problem, we decided to come up with some coordinated efforts to make this less of an issue. On the other hand it is a known fact that the results of testing the same piece of software on different platforms makes it overall more stable too.

The most interesting project however is the MHDDK Measurement Hardware Driver Development Kit which Tim Ousley of NI is also working on. Tim presented his work by introducing the first components of his MDK toolkit during his very interesting ''Register-Level-Programming in LabVIEW for Linux, PocketPC and MacOS-X''-session on Thursday at NI-Week. Some of you may have noticed parts of it running on a G5 at the Apple booth. It is the idea to create a set of efficient and extremely fast routines which allow to perform register level DAQ programming with a large variety of DAQ-boards directly from LabVIEW, essentially stripping any redundant overhead caused by some monumental piece of blackbox driver between LabVIEW and the hardware.

This is a platform independent project and will also hopefully trigger growing ''G''-programmer activities. More information about this is available from:

http://sine.ni.com/apps/we/nioc.vp?cid=11737&lang=US

The examples of Tim Ousley's work for MacOS-X can be downloaded HERE.

Note that this is semi-official work in the development stage and there is no official support form NI for this at the moment.

I hope that this will be enough information for all those who are interested and who don't already know about the fresh wind in the sails of LabVIEW everywhere.

Urs

Urs Lauterburg
Physics demonstrator
LabVIEW wireworker
Physics Institute
University of Bern
Switzerland

Posted by Urs Lauterburg at 05:53 PM Permalink

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Informal LabVIEWers on the Mac gathering

Dear LVers affiliated with the Apple Macintosh platform,

We would like to stage some unofficial gathering of the LabVIEW wireworker community working on LabVIEW's heritage platform to discuss some projects and future activities. Please, those of you who will be in Austin during NI-Week 2003 and interested to join, please mail me a note and I will get back to you with further information.

Urs

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Urs Lauterburg
University of Berne
urs.lauterburg@phim.unibe.ch

Posted by Urs Lauterburg at 11:00 PM Permalink | Comments (3)

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