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Over on reddit someone asked for suggestions on how to make a sliding UI like you might find on your phone. I thought it was a fun challenge so here is my very rough draft that could probably be turned into a QControl. And a video. At the moment you can only change the settings of booleans and of a selection like the days of the week I show. I planned on putting code for handling string and numeric value changes but probably spent too much time on this already. Android Sliding UI Demo.zip

There’s three that come to mind. No one but me liked my Recursion structure node as an alternative (improvement, in my opinion) over just allowing a VI to call itself as a subVI. I took a rather radical position that recursion should have a compiler-provable base case as part of its declaration, and that raw function recursion, though critical in math, is not healthy in a programming environment because compilers cannot really prove (in most cases) that it doesn’t blow up the stack. But every other language just has recursion... my structure node was too different. I had a really bad design for sets and maps back in 2001 that I pushed hard for: a complete by-reference design that I’d worked out. That one got me a lecture from Jeff K that rings in my ears to this day on the value of by-value. There was a good-natured-but-insistent afternoon of all the senior devs basically taking turns showing all the really bad architectures my API enabled until I finally got the point. 🙂 Eighteen years later, I lead the effort to put the by-value API in. I have a bunch of NXG designs that were too radical to gain traction. Most notable of those was formalizing the error propagation and handling to wipe error wires out of most diagrams. I and two other researchers worked on that for almost a year, and we were really excited by the design, but the shipping timetable didn’t allow us to do it... so they implemented the same error cluster. We were told that we could do it later, but now it would be a breaking diagram change... bigger hurdles. Unlikely to happen now. There’s more. Those are the ones that come to mind easily.

NXG is not my area of concern at this time. I can see it approaching in the rear view mirror, but my job is to hold the accelerator down on the current product as long as possible... NXG is a much larger dev team... they'll overtake my team eventually... but today isn't that day. 🙂