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I don't mind the new green on the landing page of ni.com, but elsewhere on the site the new theme is a bit too much. I wanted to fix the near invisible links that @LogMAN ran into, but got a bit carried away: If anyone is interested in using the blue style, you can download it from here. Be warned it's not perfect, there's still lots of green bits on mouse over etc, but I find overall it makes the site much more readable. If blue isn't your thing, the primary color can be changed by setting the root --forrest-green color to something else.

NI Systems Engineering

The worst, but really really rare case, would be for the tool to create damaged binary. But I'm doing a lot of checks to avoid that. And you already stumbled upon some of the checks: The tool does a lot of checks and raises exceptions if anything looks out of the ordinary. The exceptions are then captured and the block which raised them is exported as a binary file, without trying to make it XML. In case of VICD you'll actually always see this, as I didn't published parsing of the data. This means the VICD will just always stay as binary. If you want to be sure the data is identical to source, just go with: ./readRSRC.py -vv -x -i ./lv10/vi.lib/dex/DexPropertyNode.vi ./readRSRC.py -vv -c -m ./DexPropertyNode.xml cmp -l ./lv10/vi.lib/dex/DexPropertyNode.vi ./DexPropertyNode.vi In other words - export the file, then re-create the binary without changes, and compare both binaries. The tool checks whether it can re-create the checksum from your file - after all, it always tries to re-create identical data after export and import. Brute-force scan will happen only on damaged files - where the checksum doesn't match using the usual algorithm. The tool then assumes the issue is in salt. If the tool can't figure out how to re-create the salt used for password, it will export the salt into XML, and won't re-compute it when re-creating binary (unless you modify the XML to re-enable auto-computation). The tool will re-create everything correctly, if only you will modify it in exported form. I could add an option which would make it assume the input file is damaged, and skip that scan. Well, you could use the same code which handles "change password", only replace password work with your fun. But the way to rename blocks using my work model is: 1. Export VI to XML 2. Change the tag name in XML, for example replace "<CLIv>" and "</CLIv>" with "<LIvi>" and "</LIvi>". 3. Re-build the VI from XML Yes, block idents are just the tag names; they are only a bit modified to meet XML standard, ie. "#" are replaced by "sh" and "\0" codes are just skipped; but the tool will re-create the 4-char ident from tag name during import. I see. Yeah, there's no way around that.

It is growing on me too (with exceptions mentioned before). It actually feels refreshing in some sense, which is probably what they intended. It seems to me that they have totally forgotten about their existing customers. I actually haven't received any invitation, message or notification from NI about any of this (did anyone?). We are the ones that are most excited to use their products now and that doesn't seem to be worth anything. We are also the ones who are passionate about sharing our knowledge and excitement with the next generation of engineers. VIWeek, LAVA, LabVIEW Wiki, OpenG, the Idea Exchange and many more initiatives are prime examples of this. It is very easy for excitement to turn in to frustration if you don't know what is coming next. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong supporter of NI, LabVIEW and anything that comes with it and I sincerely hope that I can continue to do so for the next decades. I'm just frustrated that so many exciting new things are "dumped" in a way that make me feel left out.

It is uncommon enough to do the job -- truly unique is hard to do with the limits imposed on modern logos. Color: The folks who study this said that the blue was a color used all over the place in corporate logos; the green is much rarer. There's really only a handful of colors that are available for corporate logos: red and blue are the big dogs, then green/purple/orange. And black. Yellow doesn't have enough contrast -- as we constantly prove trying to put the LV logo on things, so it has to be boxed into stuff. Yes, you pick a shade of those colors, but your logo will be bucketed anyway -- Hulu, TechCrunch, and NI have very different greens, but it's all just "green" when evaluating uniqueness. What that means is, yeah, you can argue about particular shades, but it's hard to actually be unique, so it is all about finding a not-as-common color for your industry. Green works for NI. Symbol: The logo has to be renderable recognizably down to absurdly small sizes, which limits how many places you can put the logo before you end up with a smudge -- which happened to the blue eagle a lot. Something that is easily represented by vectors scales a lot better. The eagle was a distinctly USA symbol in some places -- sometimes a pro, sometimes a con. Or it was recognized as something else. The new logo isn't a representation of anything, so it doesn't accidentally pick up cultural baggage. Is it wild and unique? No. Generally, modern multinational logos cannot afford to be splashy like the old LabVIEW logo was -- too many colors limits where you can use it, and too many graphics limits its scale. But it'll be recognizable. That's the goal more than anything. And it represents a break from the past, and there was a fair amount in that presentation that was different than the Dr. T era. Most of it good, some of it aspirational. We'll see how it goes.