Neil Pate

Please do give it another whirl. Certainly it is getting better just most of the pain points we have been moaning about for literally years are not being addressed. I feel this feedback is just going nowhere. It is quite telling that the devs of NXG do not monitor LAVA (I agree with you). I wish NI could show us a just a single medium or large application that is being developed in NXG. Thankfully Current Gen is still fantastic and just getting better, but at some point (probably in less than five years) work is just going to be stopped and then it will slowly wither into irrelevance.

I really like the auto-alignment feature of the Front Panel, but why is this disabled when designing a new gtype? There seems to be no snap at all so getting things to line up nicely in a cluster is a lot more work than it should be.

Anyone want to guess what is in the bottom icon? (Not to be confused with the Cluster which looks quite similar and is just above it). Yes, you guessed right. Decorations and control references! Because those definitely deserve to be grouped together. But just to further confuse things, they are now called Data Placeholders. I am sorry, I just cannot believe this GUI was designed by anyone who has actually used LabVIEW in any capacity or that this is the result of 8 years of iteration.

Buttons? Come on... what is wrong with saying they are Booleans? "True and False" data? Phew glad this was changed. What is next, renaming a DMA FIFO to "magic thingy the computer does to get data into the memory stuff without bothering the brains bit"?

Selectors, seriously? This was the best name the committee came up with?

These are not actually Data Types. There are palettes for manipulation of data.

Why are there two different representations of clusters and arrays?

Please tell me I have missed something obvious... By visual inspection of the project, what is the access scope of the two methods in the class? NXG has taken away Virtual Folders and also now visual indication of access scope? I am being dumb here right, I must be missing something obvious surely? For comparison, here is a class I wrote 10 years ago, which of these looks easier to use? (Note my actual class on disk has a flat structure, no API or Sub VIs directories are present.) Now I have reminded myself that Virtual Folders are gone. This is so terrible.... Why NI? 😞

Check out this excellent presentation that covers a lot of the bases. https://www.studiobods.com/en/niweek2019-ts170/

I am still not convinced I want to develop a 2000+ VI project in NXG ... or that it has even been done yet. We are probably close to 8 years (or more) into development of NXG. That is a very long time to go without this kind of test.

AQ, maybe NI does things differently, but when I sit down to my customers at the start of a new project I explain to them we need to try and get the GUI design as close to correct quite early on as changing it later can have huge implications (cost, frustration etc). It does not seem this was done by NI. Surely we, the audience of lava, are approximately your target customer? Between us, the forum peeps who have commented on this thread have probably spent hundreds of thousands of hours using current gen., shipped hundreds (probably more like thousands) of totally different applications, directly or indirectly been responsible for tens of millions of dollars worth of NI hardware purchases and use LabVIEW in vastly different ways. Yet it seems our opinion is worth virtually nothing when it comes to deciding the direction of NXG. I have been really quite happy with LabVIEW current gen for the last few years (except for a few weird editor issues which made me skip certain versions completely) .., but at some point NI is going to turn off the tap, and I fear that is going to be sooner rather than later. Also, we want our new shiny NXG toys to play with now 😉 but cannot afford to invest into something that may not pan out.

Thank you. Sounds like I should just wait a few weeks for the official release of 2020 and 5.0

Thanks. Do you know if I were to install it now and start to tinker with it I could then activate it with a Pro license when it is officially released in a few weeks time? I am certainly not going to be deploying my commercial application for a few months still.

So I have a commercial project I am developing a subset of in NXG (specifically I am using the Web Module) . Currently I am using 4.0. I am excited to try out the new version and have a few questions about 5.0 NXG Community Edition. Can I download and use it for my commercial application as I have a valid Software Reference Library license? Does it install to its own special location that is going to be different from 5.0 NXG full version? Am I crazy for attempting to install it straight onto my dev PC that I actually need to do work on? (NXG in a VM is a memorable experience for all the wrong reasons).

Well, apart from the bug in LV8 (I think) where moving files around using the file tab would cause them to go into the wrong place on disk I am pretty happy with it! I must be an oddball. Regarding your previous comment about changing the icons in the project in NXG if you had your way... this is a bit scary. If you (yes, we really do put you on a pedestal!) cannot get traction within NI what hope is there for mere mortals like us. Thank you for your comments though (🙏), even though I sound a bit negative I genuinely appreciate the time you take to engage. I know a product the size of NXG is the result of the direction and labour for a large number of managers and developers, but I not so secretly wish more NI decision makers would comment here. I know there are other forums I could post this on which might get more involvement from NI, but I feel the general audience here on lavag represents a more accurate spread of developer skills.

I am seriously surprised scripting support (or interfaces) are given higher priority to fixing the GUI. That seems like aiming for the 1 percent use case. Probably less than 1 percent actually. Apart from the tool makers, who is honestly using scripting enough to warrant its prioritization? Put another way, is there a single medium or large application developedfrom scratch in NXG or even converted from CG NI can showcase to us to put our fears at rest? I am talking more than 20 or 30 classes, something like that.

hooovahh, we have been giving feedback for > 5 years. Nobody with any authority to direct change seems to be interested. The thing I cannot understand is this... the engineers intimately familiar with LabVIEW today are the engineering managers of tomorrow. NI is pissing off the engineers of today who are the ones signing the purchase orders of tomorrow. I never intended for this post to descend into a rant session, I am just disappointed that after so much investment by NI this is the product that has been laid on the table. There was no need to revisit change every single decision in current gen, most of the paradigms worked really well. I would literally hold captive anyone even remotely interested in LabVIEW and gush wildly over its amazingness, like a parent gushing over their favourite child. Now when people ask me about NXG I sort of blink and stare into the distance and change the conversation.

And this is another thing that makes the jump to NXG less palatable; it is like starting over.

@Aristos Queue, the problem is the GUI is everything. It does not really matter what is going on under the hood (although all us CG devs really appreciate the regular strides forward). I have yet to speak to another dev who has tried out NXG and is really excited about the majority of changes that have been made. It *really* feels as though very few actual current LabVIEW devs were consulted in the process. I am sure you will say that NI have done studies and had focus groups etc etc (which I totally believe), but to me personally the new changes suck. I have used the Digital Pattern Editor which has the same GUI framework as NXG and the MDI nature of the GUI sucks so much. All the time I need to be able to look at several different things, and MDI makes this an exercise in frustration.

I must admit I have not fully grokked all the changes with classes and types in NXG. Last time I looked it was a mess so I just left it for a while. Your screenshot makes me sad for a bunch of reasons. So much ugly grey except for the totally random bits of blue thrown in. Now, lets think about the lack of consistency here. On the top left the file icon has a blue background to show us it is selected, ok cool So in the tree view Library.gcomp is selected, but it is not blue... ok... why? The tab in the middle pane is not coloured blue to indicate it is current... ok... why? On the right we have a tab structure and the Document tab which is currently selected is highlighted... Sigh... am I the only one who sees stuff like this or am I just crazy and looking at it totally wrongly? Why are the tickboxes in the middle coloured blue? This is so random. Now, I am not a graphic designer, and I am sure that NI has done their due diligence in designing this GUI that we spend 40+ hours a week interacting with, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt (again...) but I just don't get it.

Yikes, this I did not know! This was probably decided by the same committee that came to the conclusion that nobody really should be using Virtual Folders anyway. 🙄

Don't forget NI is a hardware sales company. LabVIEW is just the tool that allows them to sell more hardware. I suspect this is why there is such a heavy push to have hardware integration directly in LabVIEW NXG (to the detriment of the system as a whole). NI have decided to get in on the whole cloud business with SystemLink but again they have missed the point that by far the majority of LabVIEW devs just dont care about this or wont use it. Happily, the community edition will be able to compete on price with all the other zero cost languages out there, but candidly I feel that the ship has sailed for younger devs, and those holding LabVIEW tickets are still at home putting their pyjamas.

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 🙂

Thanks Darren. Now I just need to remember this feature exists. I work with 2015, 2017 and 2019 regularly so it can be tricky remembering what things are available in which version. Especially interesting is your change to the menu ordering for clean up wire, I have been trying to remember this one for nearly a year now! (I know I can turn it off but eventually I will be using only greater than 2019 so I may as well get used to it)

Wow, just spotted this menu today. I right-clicked on a class wire and noticed a menu item with the same name as my class, and inside I got this automatically generated palette. I guess someone is going to tell me it has been in LabVIEW for like 5 years or something?