Leaderboard

Why are so many things just that little bit harder in or weirder in NXG? I am trying to use it to make my first "real" application, in this case a relatively simple WebVI. I put this list down in the hope someone can tell me I am being dumb and there is a sensible way to do these thing Why can I not easily branch off a wire by clicking on it somewhere? Now I have to right click and select the option to create a wire branch Why can I not right click on a primitive to open the sub-palette for that thing to give me similar items. I can right click and replace or right-click and insert... Example, I have an existing 2D array wire I want to get the size of, there is no way for me to right click the wire to quickly open the array palette and then drop down a Size primitive I have to relearn the whole palette structure as all the icons have changed. OK that is fine so let me explore a bit and poke around but I cannot keep a palette open by pinning it? (OK so it turns out I can do this if I start the browse from the left-hand palette and then weirdly click the << arrow, but I am so used to opening the palette by right clicking on the diagram). Arg, then the pop-up help covers over the next item in the list 😞 The Align menu is so much less usable in that drab gray and single line. There was nothing wrong with the way it is implemented in Current Gen, why change this? The GUI is so dull in general. The colours are washed out and grey everywhere is just depressing. It sounds silly but it makes me not want to use it. Sorry, but MDI is not a suitable technique for anything other than the most trivial of applications. I like the really like the zoom but please let us pan with the middle-mouse or something similar Please pop open menu items as soon as I browse into them, rather than forcing me to click (looking at you Case Structure Cases and Align menus) Why are the icons so confusing. Please can someone explain how the picture below conveys any information that this array concatenation. Why can I not run a Sub VI in a WebVI? In order to test the correctness of a piece of code I have to move it out of the .gcomp to run in isolation, and this actually moves the code on disk What was fundamentally wrong with the Project Window in Current Gen? I have a vertical monitor that I use exclusively for displaying the Project window and it is amazing. I don't particularly like the new implementation but at least let me undock it! I am also not really filled with confidence that as my project grows in size it will not become overwhelming (yet another reason to keep Virtual Folders) This is just a small subset of the items I am currently struggling with. In general I am quite forgiving of new software, but I think NXG has been baking in the oven for something like 8 years! I appreciate that NXG has not been designed for me, rather I suspect it is targeted at a whole new audience of LabVIEW developer. As such I know my muscle memory is going to be really detrimental in getting me up to speed with this new way of doing things so I am trying really hard to not let that get in the way of my journey. Something deep down just makes me worry that the essence of what makes LabVIEW (current gen) so special has been lost in translation. It just feels like too many decisions have been made by people who are not actually very familiar with LabVIEW. This makes me a bit sad as I have no doubt that a ridiculous amount of engineering effort and love has gone into NXG (and am under no illusions at the scale of the task of rewriting current gen). All in all my experience trying to develop a non trivial (not by much though) application in NXG has further cemented my thoughts that I am going to have to stick with current gen for the foreseeable future. That said, strength and courage to NI. I will check back again in a few years. ps: I am really excited for the WebVI technology. Please port it to Current Gen so I can actually use it 🙂

File > Preferences > Editor > Wiring lets you change this back to CG behavior. NXG gives you the hand tool when you hold the space bar instead of Ctrl+Shift like in CG. One minor improvement (my opinion) is that, in NXG, the scroll wheel will move the diagram up and down but if you shift+scroll, the diagram will move right to left (CG just scrolls up/down faster). That's about the extent of my NXG knowledge.

'Comp' turned out to be primitive mask-based compression which skips zeros, was easy to implement. 'ZComp' was just the ZLib-based compression, which in later versions is used without being explicitly marked. 'UnComp' is just as the name suggests - uncompressed data. For some reason it follows the same code path as the other two, but the decompressor just copies input to output. So it trolled me into thinking it does something more.

Okay so I wrote some code back in the 2011 era for doing some graph stuff and never used it. As a result there are a few places that the code could take advantage of modern functions (limited events, array tunnels, conditional, and concatenating, VIMs, even Set and Maps) but in any case I have it here for others to take a look at and use as they want. I don't intend on updating this further. It all started when I found the built in graph controls to be limiting in terms of signal selection and control. I wanted a way for a user to select the signals they want and then show those on a graph with a shared time scale. The problem was at the time the checkbox selector on a graph could have a scroll that couldn't be controlled. So I started with a single column listbox showing all signals and allowing multiple to be selected. I wanted to see the current value so I added that. Scope creep kept going until I'm left with this thing that isn't done, but isn't terrible. In this demo there is a subpanel mode, independent windows, pause and resume, the normal graph palette controls, independent Y axis scaling, coloring, buffer size control, visible signals selection and values, and a few other things. It was intended to be used in places where speed and exact values weren't used. It was more or less a place where all signals of a system could be seen slowly. It uses a few things I've posted on LAVA before. My Variant Repository, Array VIMs, and Circular Buffer. Here is a video. Circular Graph.vipc