gleichman

I took a look at those presentations but only briefly as this programming isn't my "job" per say. I'll take a closer look and see if I can't get some tips and direction. As for an apparent lack of organization, apparent would be the key word. Believe it or not (seems like not around here) my program is very organized. Each tab has processes information that another tab does but at the same time is specialized. Example; The VE fuel needs RPM, MAP, and BLM averaged. The main HUD shows RPM, MAP, and BLM but the BLM is instantanious! This is why I used tabs. There is a lot of redundancies and I needed it to be easy for the user to go back and forth between tabs without a lot of clicking.

I'm no expert but aren't tabs suposed to be a form of organization? If that's not what I'm doing then I'm obviously in the wrong place. My code uses the tab displayed to case out the terminals that don't need updating. As in, switch away from that "busy" front tab to a different tab and the front tab gauges don't get updated. What's that called, a state machine? It's in a loop .

When I said that the UI suffered from an apparent lack of organization, I was (as I stated in my post) NOT referring to your use of the tab control. I did not go into detail because it was off topic.

[OT] Problems with the UI and ways to improve it, IMHO.

1. The group of LED indicators appear organized, but everything else seems sandwiched together (placed wherever they fit). Use smaller (less graphical) indicators and group them logically with clusters or decorations. Leave white space between groups.

2. Controls are at unexpected places. For example the "STOP" button (probably an important thing) is hidden in the middle of your panel among many attention grabbing indicators. Other controls are dangling in and out of the tab control and some have no labels.

A good UI makes your software easier to use by others (less support required!). Here is an example of how I used a tab control interface. The first tab is a summary and the other tabs show detailed information for each DUT.

That is mighty speculatory. Sure my program isn't perfect but to say this is how not to use tabs is wrong.

I would have to agree with Jon. I don't think the main problem with his UI is the tabs. (Please don't take this personally) This UI suffers from an apparent lack of organization and an over use of clever controls. I would suggest taking a look at some past NI Week presentations of "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" by Greg M. NI's web site is being updated at the moment, so I can't provide a direct link.

6. Show/Hide Controls -- In UIs that have CPU intesive indicators (Tables, Graphs, ect.), I have a show/hide option that I used to implement with the visible property, but I now use tabs. The added bennefit is that I can put a message or picture in the empy tab saying that the indicators have been hidden for faster execution.

Alan

The problem with that VI is that it prints the panel as documentation, that is with a header. To create reports for instance it is usually not desirable to have any other information on the printout than what is on the actual panel that is to be printed.

This printout of panels without any additional information works very fine if you set the VI properties to "print when completed". But you have to create your own custom print dialog because the one discussed earlier will not indicate a user cancel.

Rolf Kalbermatter

This brings up an interesting option. I'm not using VI panels to create reports. I'm using MS-Excel with the report generation toolkit. Could I call the print dialog through Excel? I've done some digging, but I haven't found anything yet.

The interesting thing about the VI that Yonatan suggested is that it returns an error on Cancel! I feel like I'm working with VB again (many solutions that almost work).

Alan

Because the Austin Convention Center is (probably) cheeper in August. The weather is very hot -- it can get up to 110 degF! And, it is easier for people to take a week off of work during the summer.

The rate card for the convention center makes no mention for seasonal discounts. It looks expensive all year around, but I'm not in the convention business.

ACC Facility Rental Information

I agree that it is easier for some (academics, students, Europeans) to get time off during the summer, but most engineering activities are not seasonal.

Going to Texas in August for a convention is as crazy as having the Super Bowl here in Detroit in January!

Alan

Today it is sunny and 73F in Austin. Each year that I have attended NI Week, I have seen +100F on the convention center sign. I go to NI Week (when my boss lets me) because it is an excellent learning oppurtunity, but why does it have to be in August?

Alan

This is my hacked together variant of the Set Default Printer.vi. I did some empirical research activity (in earlier days this was called reverse engineering and a hex editor and some disassembly can help wonders here) and this is to the best of my knowledge what the NI VI does, with some extra code to fix the behavior of that function with invalid inputs.

That's illeagal here in the land of freedom.

There seems no way to get the cancel status at all.

Unfortunately, that's the functionality I was looking for. Reports showing up at the printer after selecting cancel is hard to explain to users. I have a very crude and not 100% work around. I check the mouse position immediately after the call. If the user has not moved the window, I know if cancel has been pushed. Of course, if the window has been moved all bets are off. Because the Print Setup window is a Dialog, I don't know anyway of tracking its position.

Alan

I would like to send my reports to a printer selected through the Windows print setup dialog. In my search, I found "Set Default Printer.vi". The problem I have with this VI (besides the fact that it is locked) is that it does not return an error or any other notification if the "Cancel" button is selected on the dialog.

Anybody know who wrote this VI or have a better suggestion for how to do this?

Alan

Thanks for the reply.

The DAQ hardware is a USB 6008.

I've recently worked with USB 6008's and I had problems with analog and digital together. My system used (5) USB 6008's and LabVIEW would hang about every 10 or so executions. Here are a few suggestions:

Install motherboard specific drivers for your USB chipset.

Remove other USB devices (mouse?)

Don't use a USB hub. Connect directly to the USB port on the back of your computer. (Although a hub worked better for me than PCI-USB cards.)

Acquire your digital data on an analog channel.

Revert back to NIDAQmx Base 2.0?

I hope one of these will help.

Alan

You can't acquire analog data in multiple instances from the same hardware as you have discovered, but there should not be a problem with your seperate analog and digital calls. A few follow up questions:

What DAQ hardware are you using?

Is LabVIEW crashing or is your program hanging?

Have you tried execution highlighting to pinpoint the problem?

Have you verified the trigger with a scope? (Is it waiting for a trigger that never comes?)

Have you tried the program with the digital part removed?

Good Luck,

Alan

I bought a new car last week. I wanted to get a personalized plate, but my wife who will be the primary driver didn't want to have to explain it.

The picture is the actual car, but I've obviously photoshoped the plate. Saturn calls this color fusion orange, but I like to think of it as DBL.

Alan

There is an article in the September 26 issue of Design News, "Techies Jump on Blog Bandwagon" (www.designnews.com) about blogging which prominently mentions these blogs. Congratulations Michael :thumbup: .

The article also mentions that there are several blogs by LabVIEW developers including Brian Tyler at detritus.blogs.com.

Alan

I downloaded SimpleFormatter.vi and after using it, I found a small bug. All text after the last text formatter is truncated. I also modified the search for tags to be case independent, so now <b> = <B>. This new version is in LabVIEW 7.1.

Thanks for this cool new tool jpdrolet.

In a recent Info-LabVIEW thread there was a need for HTML display.

I have wired this SimpleFormatter.vi that accepts tagged (markup text) and display it in a string. With a syntax parser that will wrap keywords with property tags, it can be used for syntax highlight.

It still require some work (to handle the character "<") and has merely been tested with the provided example. The font property also needs to be implemented. Correct syntax is assumed.

I defer panel updates when formatting the string but the string indicator is still drawn twice.

1250[/snapback]

Download File:post-151-1094751483.vi

:question: Is the list down? I have not seen any messages since yesterday afternoon (Jan 22). I stopped receiving messaages after I sent a message to the list.

I found this wood grained jelly bean button that I created a while back and showed it to one of my colleagues this morning. This led to a short discussion about creating a wood paneled UI. What do you think?

Download File:post-19-1073426189.vi