Christina Rogers

The LabVIEW 2021 Beta is now available for download. https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-2021-Public-Beta/LabVIEW-2021-Beta-Now-Available/td-p/4144143

Yay, BBQ! Can't wait to see everyone!

To quote Greg McKaskle, "These obscure features are typically kind of like the attic or basement of a house, not finished out, not very interesting, and potentially harmful. [...] If you experiment with the .ini file and you crash mysteriously losing hours of work, I'd suggest putting the file back to the way LV left it. Don't ask tech support to fix it or complain that the LV attic has rusty nails and splinters." :-) But, if you really want to know, the token allows you to enable some features on subpanels that will most likely crash LabVIEW. Some of the decorations are now in the Silver Decorations palette in LabVIEW 2014. I wrote about them on my blog: http://blog.eyesonvis.com/?p=824 The other way to get to the decorations is to copy them out of the parts of the Silver controls using the Control Editor.

enableSecretPopups - I put this token into LabVIEW 2011 for Silver control development, as a quick-and-dirty way to make low-level control edits. I've been giving it out to people on a very limited basis, but I guess since it's out here I'll widen the audience. I show a screenshot of the new menu items in https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-17431 Once this token is enabled, you'll be able to see the settings on parts of the Silver controls to get an idea what they do. eg "Left Move" means the part will move left when its "master" part changes size via moving its left edge. "Left Grow" means the part will scale in that situation. Setting both the left and right move options will make the part stay centered. There are clearly combinations that don't make any sense and I suspect LabVIEW will behave badly if you use them. I recommend that you disable the token when you're not using the Control Editor, because it also enables other menu items that are not ready for prime time and you might use them later without realizing they're only there because of this INI token.

I almost didn't get them finished in time, but I will be donating a hand-made necklace and bracelet featuring the "top" (ahem) new feature of LabVIEW 2014! That's right, the launch icon! They're reversible: 32-bit launch icon on one side, and 64-bit on the other. Some assembly required: I'm not tying off the cords so you can adjust them to fit. [i've been told men might not want to wear a necklace, but, hey, you could always share with someone special!] Brought to you by Christina Rogers, member of LabVIEW R&D, author of the Eyes on VIs blog, and creator of the (free!) graphical novel Rune: A Tale of Wizards and Kings and sequel novella Wizards and Kings: Sacrifice (only 99 cents on Kindle, and free with Kindle Unlimited!)

Thanks for sharing these and also thank you for permission to repost your videos to YouTube! The LabVIEW Coding Challenge is now posted in two parts: and

Most of what I changed for listboxes in 2013 was related to calculating cell boundaries. From profiling the code, I discovered that a) when all rows were the same height, the algorithm for calculating a cell's bounds was slower than it needed to be and b) we were calculating cell bounds more often than we needed to. Since it's fairly common for all rows to be the same height, it was worth putting in an optimization for that case.

You're welcome. (And sorry it took so long for us to find a way to address this). The changes that improved this performance were specific to the listbox, multicolumn listbox, table and tree controls. I don't expect that they will conflict with any "programming around the problem" tricks that you've used in the past.

There are no zero-pixel width splitters. (Sorry - I know they would be really useful). But Jack is correct that this should work without the top-level splitters. My recommendation is to avoid the VI property "Scale all objects on front panel as the window resizes." It almost never does what you want. Jack's example VIs work for me, but I'm guessing they are behaving differently for you because of this setting. I'm attaching a modified example that does not have that setting. Can you let me know if it works for you? Also, the "Scale Objects While Resizing" setting on the Pane (which Jack has set) is pretty important. It's not set on new VIs and it's in a really weird place (right-clicking on the scrollbar to get the shortcut menu with the Pane Sizing options). Container (1).vi Containee (1).vi

I gave away a couple advance copies of my graphic novel at the LAVA BBQ, and I'm pleased to share that the book is finally done and available for download or purchase! Anticipated FAQ: Who are you? I'm in LabVIEW R&D. I write the Eyes on VIs blog. What's a graphic novel? It's a story told in comic book format. Did you write it? Yes. Did you draw it? No. I illustrated it using 3D models rendered with a toon shader. What's it about? Here's the blurb: "500 years after the banishment of wizards, the kingdom of Valheigh faces the unthinkable: the rediscovery of wizardry and the return of the legendary evil known as the Jinn. A vengeful wizard unleashes the most horrific curse of Jinn legend such that Prince Rune must either kill the woman he loves or die at her hands." The PDF version is free and the printed book costs $25+shipping. I hope you'll check it out!

Unfortunately, that is what I'm saying. There is, as it turns out, a reason why we went without multi-select right-click menus for so long. I agree it's less-than-optimal. I don't think of it as "done" but I can see your point that it might be hard to lobby for adding particular menu items. Is there anything that would make you more "delighted" without covering every available right-click menu option? Oh, BTW, I forgot to mention this earlier, but the multi-select right-click not working in the Control Editor (and thus also for LVClass private data) is a bug that has been reported and should be fixed in a future version.

Unfortunately, the reason that this doesn't work the way you expect is that it was a lot more expensive to implement multi-select right-click menus than you would think. We don't have plans to put every right-click menu option into the multi-select menu framework, but if there are specific ones that you think have high value (e.g. common operations, operations not in Properties) then please let me know or propose it on Idea Exchange and I'll see what we can do.

Happy to help!

If you go to View>>Getting Started window and click the Create Project button, it should invoke the dialog even if you have the INI token set to make blank projects from the menu.

We are strongly encouraging users to create projects from templates, but if you have the need to create blank projects often you can change the menu to the old behavior with the useNewProjWiz INI token described on the LabVIEW WIKI: http://labviewwiki.org/LabVIEW_configuration_file/Miscellaneous

In what has to be the most off-topic LAVA/OpenG BBQ door prize ever, I'll be giving away two advance copies of my graphical novel Rune: A Tale of Wizards and Kings, which is coming out in October.

Bought my ticket! Party party party!