LV Fit will not be a product (aka Bug of the Day)

[Aristos Queue]

We had a bug appear in the development version of LabVIEW this week. It was the kind that makes developers ask questions like, "How did that happen and if we don't fix it can we call it a feature?"

Let me stress that this isn't a bug in any shipping version of LabVIEW.

The bug: Mass Compile only runs to completion if you keep moving the mouse. If you stop moving the mouse, mass compile hangs. The faster you move the mouse, the faster mass compile runs.

I and a couple others spent three days hunting this bug down, but along the way, there were many comments about the introduction of the new "LabVIEW Fit" -- a new product for building arm endurance in LabVIEW users. Imagine all these buff programmers (well, buff in one arm, anyway) showing up at NI Week, where we hand out t-shirts that said "I compiled vi.lib!" on the front. For the less athletic, NI offers new hardware: a mouse that moves back and forth for you. For only $100, you could buy the new NI Metronome Mouse so you can practice piano while you wait for your mass compile to complete.

Other suggestions included

-- the manual progress bar, where users had to click on each pixel themselves to advance the progress bar, one pixel at a time, thus solving the problem of inaccurate progress bars

-- "click the gopher" web ads -- if you click the gopher, you win a million dollars in Viagra and home mortgages!

Alas, we did finally find what the issue was -- XControls were waiting for UI events that would never come during a mass compile -- so these fantastic features will never be. But I thought our users would like to know that we never stop thinking about ways to improve your lives.

:-)

[Black Pearl]

You could show up a nice little stupid game like minesweeper (anything more click-intensive?).

Felix

[Jim Kring]

That's funny!

... And, it reminds me of all the times I've had to repeatedly press Cancel/Ignore when LabVIEW shows me Find Missing VIs dialog when loading large projects that are missing VIs or the VI Password dialogs when searching VI hierarchies with password protected VIs. (Note: I think that these issues are mostly/already fixed, in newer LV versions).

There have been times that I just jammed a paperclip between the keys in my keyboard to hold the Escape key down -- no way to get fit by cheating

[Dan DeFriese]

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ May 20 2009, 07:56 PM)

There have been times that I just jammed a paperclip between the keys in my keyboard to hold the Escape key down -- no way to get fit by cheating

That's not cheating, this is pragmatic engineering. I'm still looking for a pendulum ducky that Homer Simpson used so I can automate close the Resolve Load Conflict dialogs.

[crelf]

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ May 20 2009, 08:56 PM)

There have been times that I just jammed a paperclip between the keys in my keyboard to hold the Escape key down -- no way to get fit by cheating

Maybe NI needs to change it to look for the key down event so you can't get away with that