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Stay thirsty my friends

I admit I don't use GIFs in my UI's much, and when I do I usually don't care about how fast they run. But I just did a quick test with this GIF cause it was one of the first results on google, and the speed seemed to match the speed of Chrome for the VI when running or not, with the only noticeable hiccup is when running or stopping the VI. This is using LabVIEW 2015 SP1 Windows 7 x64. Is this a GIF you can post to test with? How many frames are in the GIF? You can be a bit hacky and use a picture ring and invoke the image based on how much time has elapsed. Oh and you can also use a .NET picture box, here is some code I posted a while ago showing how to load an image, but for some reason it isn't animated, it could be a setting with the picture box.

It's a general tendency I have noticed on LabVIEW forums, although maybe less so on the NI forums. I also signed up at the German LabVIEW forum and while 5 or 6 years ago you had every day several new topics varying from the newbie question of how to do a simple file IO operation to the advanced topic of system architecture and interfacing to external code, nowadays it is maybe a tenth of that with most topics ranging in the more trivial category. The German forum had and has a somewhat broader target range since it was equally meant for beginners and advanced users while LAVA started by the nature of its name as a forum for somewhat more advanced topics, although I would like to think that we never really gave a newbie a bad feeling when posting here, as long as that person didn't violate just about every possible netiquet there is. The German forum may have one additional effect that may contribute to it getting less traffic and that is that English has also in Germany got the defacto standard in at least engineering. But without having any numbers to really compare I would say that the German forum and LAVA have seen similar decay in number of new posts and answers in general. And yes I have been wondering about that. Where did those people go? I feel that some went to the NI forums as they got more accessible over time but I do think that a more important aspect is that LabVIEW has gotten in many places just one of many tools to tackle software problems whereas in the past it was more often THE tool in the toolbox of many developers. That is probably a somewhat jaded view from personal experience but I certainly see it in other places too when I get there during my job. And Shaun definitely addresses another point when he mentions that LabVIEW innovation has slowly been getting to the point of stagnation in the last 5 to 10 years. That would hurt specialized forums like LAVA or a local forum like the German forum most likely a lot more than the NI forum, which catches most of the more trivial user questions of how to get something done or about perceived or real bugs. I'm not sure in how far the NI forum has been seeing a similar slow down. Personally I feel it might have been getting a little less active overal in comparison but what is more apparent is the fact that there too the general level of advanced topics has been slowing down, which would be in accordance about little to no innovations in LabVIEW. The interesting things have been discussed and brainstormed about and very little new things got added that would spur new discussions. What is posted nowadays is mostly about problems when using LabVIEW or some hardware or how to get a simple job down quickly! Is LabVIEW dead? I wouldn't feel so as I still see it used in many places but the excitement about using LabVIEW has been somewhat lost by many. It's a specialized tool to do certain things and in a way the only one in town doing it in this way, but by far not the only one you can use to do these things. In fact there have been many new and not so new possibilities about doing it (I see for instance regularly situations where people have decided to use Python for everything even the UI, which is not something I would easily consider) and the general target has been shifting too. If you want to do internet related stuff then LabVIEW is definitely not the most easy solution and also not the most powerful one. Engineering simply has been getting a lot broader in the last 10 years and while measurement and testing where you directly tinker with hardware and sensors still is quite important, there has been another big market developed that has very little to do with this and where the qualities of LabVIEW don't shine as bright or even show nasty oxidation spots. Maybe the fact that LabVIEW always was designed as a closed environment with very limited possiblities to be extended directly by 3rd parties has hurt it to the point of being forced into the niche market it always tried to protect for itself. It will be interesting to see how NI is going to attempt to fix that. The stagnation in LabVIEW development is something which supposedly happened because they focused the energy on a fundamental redesign of the LabVIEW platform, which has dragged on longer than hoped for and claimed more resources than was good for the existing LabVIEW platform.

If you answer why you haven't visited in 2 years then that will probably be the answer you seek. Not sure what you mean by "cool" discussions. If you mean things like LVOOP then, personally, I don't think it has anything to do with LavaG being past it. LabVIEW stagnated over 5 years ago and all the subjects have been talked to death and everyone has written and debugged their frameworks (as they were in other languages 10 years before that). There were really only a handful of contributors (AQ, Daklu, Shoneill .... and now I'm struggling) and the only one that still visits to contribute is Shoneill, I think. Generally, though the lack of LabVIEW innovation is the main reason there are less "cool" discussions generally. The thing that made this apparent to me was when a 15 year old technology (Vi Macros) was suddenly re-discovered and piqued everyones interest. There was then a flurry of contribution and excitement (especially me) that brought me out of answering implementation questions and sparked my need to investigate and explore - something that probably hadn't happened for a couple of years on LavaG. So new "cool stuff" isn't being discussed because LabVIEW isn't developing new "cool stuff". VI macros ended with the development of "Named Events" and that is "Cool" with a capital "ICE" If Lavag.org goes then I will not be going over to ni.com. I never post on ni.com and probably only visit it 2-3 times a year if Google gives me a result in the top 5.I got tired of it demanding to know the inside circumference of my colon just to log in and the quality of answers is nowhere near as adroit or concise as on here. You know how after 10 years of programming when you have a problem that would be a 10 minute fix if only you knew x, y or z? So you phone up NI and manage to get through to an application engineer then spend the next 4 hours explaining your problem and them passing it on to someone that actually knows, waiting for their response then replying back. Three days later of this back and forth and they finally escalate your query and you get to talk with the actual person that knows and they tell you "Oh thats what you wanted? x=2, y=4 and z=8". Thats ni.com! In this analogy, LavaG is where ni.com escalates the query to. So don't think of ni.com it as a competitor. Think of it as a filter for studenty and mundane questions