Discover LabVIEW tools - Have you tried VIPM.io?

[javier_r]

Hello everybody!

Wondering how many people have tried the new vipm.io site. We have added a ton of features to make it easy to Discover LabVIEW Tools and there are some cool ones coming soon.

Check it out and let me know what you think 😀

 

Javier

Edited August 18, 2020 by javier_r

[Antoine Chalons]

I have used it and I have a question about the package list that we can create : a list can be private / unlisted / public, how "safe" is private? I mean, can I upload there the VIPs that I want no one have access to?

[Mads Toppe]

Never used it until now, and do not think I will use it again. With the VI Package Manager installed it feels more natural to use that. If the web interface offered more  information about each package in a compact form it might have been useful though (until the same was available in VIPM...).
To have packages visible and linkable on the web is good when you do not already have the more able alternative installed on your computer I guess. Now that VIPM even comes bundled with LabVIEW most people needing packages can fire up that to do the full job of finding and installing packages there anyway though.

[X___]

What's the idea? It doesn't know which package I have installed for what version and therefore cannot tell me whether a new version is available and I should check out. 19 pages of listing instead of the compact window I can easily filter and check out at a glance...

Edited August 19, 2020 by X___

[javier_r]

8 hours ago, Antoine Chalons said:

I have used it and I have a question about the package list that we can create : a list can be private / unlisted / public, how "safe" is private? I mean, can I upload there the VIPs that I want no one have access to?

Hi @Antoine Chalons, private lists are ONLY accessible to you. Can I ask more about your use case?

 

[Porter]

Just submitted my Robust CSV package. The process was very smooth. I like that it is geared toward open source packages only. Hopefully this means that the quality requirements are a little bit more relaxed than LV tools network (eg. including example code in example finder).

[javier_r]

7 hours ago, Mads Toppe said:

Never used it until now, and do not think I will use it again. With the VI Package Manager installed it feels more natural to use that. If the web interface offered more  information about each package in a compact form it might have been useful though (until the same was available in VIPM...).
To have packages visible and linkable on the web is good when you do not already have the more able alternative installed on your computer I guess. Now that VIPM even comes bundled with LabVIEW most people needing packages can fire up that to do the full job of finding and installing packages there anyway though.

Hi @Mads Toppe, 

Thanks for the message. Can you expand on "If the web interface offered more  information about each package"? What type of information would you be interested in seeing?

I guess one question for you would be, what if the web interface allowed you to find more packages/resources faster than the app?

 

[javier_r]

2 hours ago, X___ said:

What's the idea? It doesn't know which package I have installed for what version and therefore cannot tell me whether a new version is available and I should check out. 19 pages of listing instead of the compact window I can easily filter and check out at a glance...

Hi @X___, 

Thanks for the message. I think your comment is very useful. At the moment VIPM.io makes it significantly faster to search for packages and allows anyone to publish a package to be available on the VIPM Community repo. We have added Package Lists which can behave similar to a VIPC on the web. We are also adding several more features in the coming weeks so if you have more feedback please share it here

[javier_r]

13 minutes ago, Porter said:

Just submitted my Robust CSV package. The process was very smooth. I like that it is geared toward open source packages only. Hopefully this means that the quality requirements are a little bit more relaxed than LV tools network (eg. including example code in example finder).

Thanks @Porter for the comment. Yes! We want to make it easier for developers to publish (post) open source packages. We still review them and make sure the quality is there, but we aim to make this a much faster process. As a package owner you'll see different features on VIPM.io that will help you promote it (and there are various cool new features coming soon!).

Please share your experience after your package is approved as well  

[Porter]

Wow. That was very fast: https://www.vipm.io/package/lava_lib_robust_csv/

What is the process for verifying submitted packages?

[javier_r]

1 hour ago, Porter said:

Wow. That was very fast: https://www.vipm.io/package/lava_lib_robust_csv/

What is the process for verifying submitted packages?

Hi @Porter, we have one of our team members review it against a check list. Of course if we know and trust the publisher things are easier  .

[Mads Toppe]

14 hours ago, javier_r said:

Hi @Mads Toppe, 

Thanks for the message. Can you expand on "If the web interface offered more  information about each package"? What type of information would you be interested in seeing?

I guess one question for you would be, what if the web interface allowed you to find more packages/resources faster than the app?

 

Right now you just see the name and icon of the package, and a short description of what it does.   I would like to see some small icons or text at the top next to the icon of each package for example. That list of compact of information should tell me things like the price / type of license, minimum required LabVIEW version, whether the package is part of a larger set (OpenG-tools for example are easier to download by grabbing the all-in-one package), when it was introduced and last updated, project link, category....(and let us filter the list based on these parameters as well). Much of this additional information is currently available if you click in the tool, but that is a huge waste of time when you are browsing hundreds of items.

Pack the main screen tighter. The current design is far far away from information overload.

[Antoine Chalons]

16 hours ago, javier_r said:

private lists are ONLY accessible to you. Can I ask more about your use case?

 

We have some packages that we want to share within the company and maybe sometimes with a few developers from outside of the company and I just wanted to know how confident I can be that no one else is going to be able to access these packages.

[drjdpowell]

The lists are just lists.  VIP packages can't be private.

[Antoine Chalons]

That's what i suspected when I read that vipm.io is for community packages

So I don't really see the point of a private list

[drjdpowell]

I guess the point is to have a list of packages third-party packages that your team uses, without cluttering up the public list of lists with one no one else cares about (or possibly without letting competitors know what you use).

[Antoine Chalons]

"unlisted" should be enough to hide away from lurkers, no?

[jcarmody]

I particularly like that the Magic Delay Fairy QD Plug-in is prominently displayed, only one click from the home page.

[javier_r]

5 hours ago, Antoine Chalons said:

"unlisted" should be enough to hide away from lurkers, no?

Thanks @Antoine Chalons and @drjdpowell for the discussion. Unlisted allows you to have a link you can share with people but don't show the list publicly on vipm.io. Private allows you to keep the list visible ONLY to you. One use case is keeping the list Private while you are working on it so there's no link available for people to see. At the moment, if you have a VIPM Pro license you can upload a VIPC to a Package List.

@Antoine Chalons are you thinking of Package Lists as "web" VI Package Configurations?

[hooovahh]

So I'll admit I was dragging my feet a bit when it came to VIPM.io.  I sorta saw this as another standard leading to this XKCD.  But the process is pretty slick, and pretty easy.  And the fact that it seems to have already crawled LAVAs Code Repository means a few of my tools are already there and looking nice. 

One issue I saw is with the screen shot resolution limitation.  800 x 500 is a decent size, but I found some of my palettes didn't fit and needed to be shrunk to fit.  Is this size limitation just to ensure it fits on the page well?  Here is my array package and I needed to scale that image before uploading.  I'd prefer just upload any size (within reason) and have the page scale it to fit the container, then clicking it can show the full size.  Pretty minor and it works fine as it is.

 

[Michael Aivaliotis]

14 hours ago, hooovahh said:

And the fact that it seems to have already crawled LAVAs Code Repository means a few of my tools are already there and looking nice

Who gave JKI permission to do this?

[drjdpowell]

4 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

Who gave JKI permission to do this?

I don't think they did that.  There is a couple of my lava packages on there, but I explicitly uploaded them to VIPM.io

[Antoine Chalons]

5 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

Who gave JKI permission to do this?

I'm not sure exactly how it went but when VIPM.io came up I did send feedback to JKI that managing versions of "unpublished" packages was a pain in the back.

Right now, here is the list of unpublished packages that I use, somehow, if these could make it to some online repo (VIPM Community of whatever else) it would be nice.

There used to be more of them.

A couple of days after my feedback to JKI, "some" packages that were listed as "unpublished" in VIPM, moved to "VIPM Community" (amongst them some of Hooovahh's packages), thus making my like easier.

I assumed JKI had asked the publisher of those packages to do whatever it takes to make that change.

I hope this is not creating frustration for anyone 😮

[hooovahh]

10 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

Who gave JKI permission to do this?

To be clear I don't know that this is what JKI did, and no one told me they did this.  I just know I didn't upload my stuff to VIPM.IO, and saw it was there which lead me to believe that this is what they did.  The rehosting of BSD stuff is probably fine.  The using LAVAG.org in ways that might go against terms of use might not be.

[javier_r]

15 hours ago, hooovahh said:

To be clear I don't know that this is what JKI did, and no one told me they did this.  I just know I didn't upload my stuff to VIPM.IO, and saw it was there which lead me to believe that this is what they did.  The rehosting of BSD stuff is probably fine.  The using LAVAG.org in ways that might go against terms of use might not be.

Hello everybody!

@hooovahhwe are glad to see you have released some tools on VIPM.io and we have added the ability to include larger images

 

Just to clear things up about the uploaded packages: we received various requests from users (like @Antoine Chalons and others) to make a few packages with homepages on LAVA available within the VIPM Community repo. The BSD (or other) licensing terms of those packages permit redistribution, so our team did a quality inspection of the packages and then published them to VIPM. Of course we did this with the intention of making those tools easier to find via VIPM, but if any of the authors of those packages doesn't want this please let me know and we can remove them.

Have a great weekend!

Edited November 14, 2020 by javier_r