Neil Pate

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?

I only used Bitbucket for my personal consulting work so have moved away entirely there. However at my day job we are heavily into Jira and Confluence and will likely not be moving away from these any time soon.

GitKraken is free for public GitHub repositories, I never tried it with anything local but I think you are right in that the free version does work as well. I spent a few weeks with the free version and happily handed them some money for the pro version. Its a really nice client. I actually bought a second license as I had the GitHub client on my wife's computer and it was so terrible in comparison.

As much as I hate to say this, I don't really think we are NIs target audience with NXG. I would guestimate that there are probably fewer than a couple of hundred people in the world (apart from NI employees) who actually use LabVIEW scripting regularly.

That is interesting! I actually came to the same conclusion. I was trying to launch 4 of my own style actors which each opened an IMAQ reference to a (different) camera and quite often trying to do this launch in parallel would cause the system to hang. I changed it to a serial launch process and the problem never happened again.

Probably not related to your issue... but once upon a time I had a nasty piece of hardware that I had to interact with using their DLL. On a certain type of PC it would randomly crash in LabVIEW after some number of days. The same PC running a simple python script calling the same DLL functions ran without issue for weeks at a time. In the end I had to change the PC 😞 and the problem never happened again. I tried every combination of DLL settings I could think of, but nothing ever got it working nicely on that PC.

Sure. My primary motivators were: Performance (it always seemed slow even to access the web interface, and ssh pushes and pulls often took forever) The war is over, Git has been crowned the victor. I backed the wrong horse about 8 years ago and now it is time to move on. The only reason I chose Bitbucket in the first place was their support for Hg. The way they have handled the move to Git was terrible. GitHub now has free private repositories, and as of yesterday you can have teams for free Realistically, the only thing keeping me on Bitbucket for several years was the pain of moving all 100 of my repositories over to somewhere else. They forced my hand with this and I have not looked back since. Since then I have found other good things: GitKraken is incredible Visual Studio has really nice (simple) support for Git with the Git extension I don't have to remember how to pronounce Atlassian anymore

James, I took this as a good opportunity to move away from Bitbucket and to GitHub. Their import tool worked pretty well but it was a bit tedious as you say.

I am actually braving NXG for a portion of a production system. The WebVI technology does make it quite easy to do simple web stuff which is all I need for a data dashboard. Also I am happy to say that NXG 4.0 takes less than a minute to open from cold on my laptop and about 15 seconds on subsequent iterations! This is real progress 🙂

Aniket, thank you for posting this and congrats on starting your journey with lavag 🙂

My programs are so well optimised the user never notices the delay 😉 Joking aside, if I am updating that many controls that the GUI is slow to paint it is probably symptomatic of a bad GUI design.

I have tried many different techniques but my currently preferred one is to assume upfront that I am going to use property nodes for all value updates so this then allows me to have a nice Update Sub VI where I update all the values every time I need to update anything. Any non-trivial GUI seems to require property nodes to do the "fancy" stuff, so I just start off with them like that. I normally don't bother with a Defer unless I am dealing with a *lot* of indicators (which is probably a smell of a badly designed GUI) or one of the usual suspects like a big table or tree control.

Thanks Rolf, that fix worked for me too! 👍🙏🙇‍♂️ I did search but never found that thread. Phew, mystery solved!

Interesting, thanks JKSH I will see if there is a BIOS update.

Thanks Rolf, that sounds quite plausible. AQ this is a brand new CPU with a Ryzen 3600 in it. I would consider changing the CPU if NI could give some guidance on what to change it to. Is there any sort of hot fix or patch I can try? For now I am out of trouble as I have rewritten the VIs that I needed to use from that library (mine were really simple) , but I doubt others will be so lucky.

Same MD5 as yours. @Aristos Queue this is a fresh installation of 2019 SP1 64-bit installed using the offline installer. I think that DLL calls into other DLLS (like BLASPACK or something like that), but I am not sure.

@Aristos Queue I have the PC back in my possession and have run the VI you asked. Here is the result. Now, if I immediately try and drop Mean.vi I can see it is trying to load it from the correct directory But if I do into the VI and open the Call Library Function node I get the e:\builds\penguin stuff The directory on disk is correct: Does this make any sense to you?