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How do I draw in white on the icon editor?


Sparkette

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I've noticed that whenever I select white in the VI icon editor, it doesn't actually draw white; just a very light gray. I finally decided to Google http://is.gd/NEsoDF]"labview icon editor white"[/url], and it said it's because for some reason, LabVIEW considers any white on the outside of an icon to be transparent. A little outdated, but I can live with it. The problem is that unless I'm doing it by accident, any time I'm drawing anything in white I'm doing it on the inside of the icon, completely surrounded with other colors. How do I tell the icon editor to knock it off, and just use the color I select?

 

Also, does anyone know why it uses (246,246,246) and not (254,254,254)? Manually selecting the latter just gives me the former, same as selecting pure white.

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The icon editor uses a 256 color palette, which is why it won't let you select 254, but I believe 255 should be allowed inside the bounds. That said, recently I've been using LV 2009, where I'm pretty sure I'm using a modified editor, which might allow this even if the original doesn't.

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The icon editor uses a 256 color palette, which is why it won't let you select 254, but I believe 255 should be allowed inside the bounds. That said, recently I've been using LV 2009, where I'm pretty sure I'm using a modified editor, which might allow this even if the original doesn't.
Wait... It uses a limited palette? WTF? Why? There's no good reason for that on today's hardware! Where can I get a copy of this modified icon editor?
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Wait... It uses a limited palette? WTF? Why? There's no good reason for that on today's hardware! Where can I get a copy of this modified icon editor?

 

The stock Icon Editor actually uses and stores icons as 24-bit color -- yet the icon preview on FP/BD, and also instances on a BD -- are rendered with a palette that very nearly resembles (or, is exactly) the 216-color web-safe palette, plus 10 each for a spectrum of R, G, B and greyscale to make 256 colors.

 

In other news, 8-bit and minimalism (e.g., "Metro") is one branch of latest design trends -- we could turn the conversation positive and just call it ahead of its time  :)

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The stock Icon Editor actually uses and stores icons as 24-bit color -- yet the icon preview on FP/BD, and also instances on a BD -- are rendered with a palette that very nearly resembles (or, is exactly) the 216-color web-safe palette, plus 10 each for a spectrum of R, G, B and greyscale to make 256 colors.

 

In other news, 8-bit and minimalism (e.g., "Metro") is one branch of latest design trends -- we could turn the conversation positive and just call it ahead of its time  :)

 

What does Metro have to do with this? I know it's a joke, but I don't see the connection.

Edited by flarn2006
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What does Metro have to do with this? I know it's a joke, but I don't see the connection.

 

Not really a joke -- some branches of design (Metro, notably) actually are headed toward flat and rectangular, like the current rasterization of LabVIEW -- didn't mean to sound flippant.  :oops:

 

Maybe you'll find ways to accomplish your goals using the Icon API directly from <vi.lib>LabVIEW Icon API; or perhaps with the LV2012 Icon Editor source; hope this is helpful.

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Where can I get a copy of this modified icon editor?

 

Look through the documents in the group Jack linked to. PJM should have a link there to his icon editor. In 2011 this became more of an issue because the IE is now a packed library (presumably to improve performance, but hey, at least it's not password protected), so now you have to download the source separately.

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Wait... It uses a limited palette? WTF? Why? There's no good reason for that on today's hardware! Where can I get a copy of this modified icon editor?

The good reason is that is all that can be stored within the VI because we've never bothered to expand it. Sure, we could render more colors, but we don't. One of those historical facts, and upgrading the compiler optimizations and making LV compile to VHDL have taken priority over the years above expanding the render capacities of the icons.

so now you have to download the source separately.

Made available on ni.com following every release of LV (2011 and 2012 thus far).

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Actually I figured out something that works. Even if the alpha checkerboard appears in the icon editor, if it's in an enclosed area, it appears as white. It would still be nice to have it cover things in lower layers though. The alpha checkerboard can actually be useful though, as each square on the checkerboard is one (scaled) pixel in size.

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Is it weird if I prefer that look?

 

I wouldn't say I prefer it, but I have some fond memories off working on Valid and later Sun Sparc stations using a graphics editor called ged. This was used to design electronic schematics both for PCB and ASIC design. The displays were phosphor screens and had a very similar look. No draggable windows, but a fixed mouse controllable drawing area and a command line entry that allowed to edit the graphic design magnitudes quicker than any menu oriented interface. In fact QuickDrop goes quite a bit in that direction and as some people at NI expertly demonstrated really can be a big improvement in editing speed of diagrams.

There was a text script configurable button menu bar on one side of the screen to help use the less common commands, but common operations were much quicker by typing them on the keyboard than trying to find the command in the fixed menu bar and even more quick in comparison to a navigable hierarchical main or even pop-up menu.

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