Article - Customizing the LabVIEW Palettes is (Ridiculously) Hard

[Jim Kring]

[cross-post]

Hi All,

I've written another article (actually a rant) about customizing the LabVIEW palettes. I hope you find it useful.

• Customizing the LabVIEW Palettes is (Ridiculously) Hard
  

As usual, your thoughts, feedback, and stories of your related experiences are most welcome

Thanks,

-Jim

[PaulG.]

<rant of my own> Thanks again, Jime for speaking up for a lot of us. The palette structures and disease-of-use to customize them are one of the few (if any) issues I would consider user-hostile in the entire LV enviroment. And to add to our frustration, every time NI comes up with a new version it creates a brand new default palette always loaded with nothing but express vi's (???) and other useless garbage. Then you have to go through the headache to cusomize them all over again. </rant of my own>

[crelf]

QUOTE (PaulG. @ Jun 17 2008, 02:24 PM)

disease-of-use

Love the term!

[Darren]

I really dislike the palettes too...especially since everything was rearranged in 8.0. If only someone could do something about them! I mean, if somebody with my distaste for the palettes happened to work in LabVIEW R&D, then he could add a feature in the next LabVIEW release that allowed me to write VIs faster than ever before, without having to ever bring up the palettes again. Man, that would be so great! Oh well, maybe someday. Someday...

-D

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE (PaulG. @ Jun 17 2008, 11:24 AM)

<rant of my own> Thanks again, Jime for speaking up for a lot of us. The palette structures and disease-of-use to customize them are one of the few (if any) issues I would consider user-hostile in the entire LV enviroment. And to add to our frustration, every time NI comes up with a new version it creates a brand new default palette always loaded with nothing but express vi's (???) and other useless garbage. Then you have to go through the headache to cusomize them all over again. </rant of my own>

So true.

QUOTE (crelf @ Jun 17 2008, 11:41 AM)

QUOTE (PaulG. @ Jun 17 2008, 02:24 PM)

disease-of-use

Love the term!

I was thinking the same thing. I'm going to have to add that to my collection.

QUOTE (Darren @ Jun 17 2008, 12:27 PM)

I really dislike the palettes too...especially since everything was rearranged in 8.0. If only someone could do something about them! I mean, if somebody with my distaste for the palettes happened to work in LabVIEW R&D, then he could add a feature in the next LabVIEW release that allowed me to write VIs faster than ever before, without having to ever bring up the palettes again. Man, that would be so great! Oh well, maybe someday. Someday...

Yes, I think that a hypothetical tool that obviates the need for palettes in many situations would be a huge useability step forward

What I want is for LabVIEW to know which function I'm thinking about and to put it on my tooltip so that I can drop it. Is that what you're thinking of, too?

[Justin Goeres]

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Jun 17 2008, 12:42 PM)

What I want is for LabVIEW to know which function I'm thinking about and to put it on my tooltip so that I can drop it. Is that what you're thinking of, too?

How about a Markov-chain based system that would look at the node your tool is currently pointing at and analyze a handful of nodes leading to it to determine the most historically likely function?

It's in my brain because I've been playing with http://www.joshmillard.com/garkov/' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">Garkov .

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE (Justin Goeres @ Jun 17 2008, 01:57 PM)

How about a Markov-chain based system that would look at the node your tool is currently pointing at and analyze a handful of nodes leading to it to determine the most historically likely function?

It's in my brain because I've been playing with http://www.joshmillard.com/garkov/' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">Garkov .

Could we use that as a refactoring tool to create reusable VIs? It could analyze the patterns in your code and identify frequently used snippits that should be made into subVIs.

[Aristos Queue]

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Jun 17 2008, 04:25 PM)

Could we use that as a refactoring tool to create reusable VIs? It could analyze the patterns in your code and identify frequently used snippits that should be made into subVIs.

Careful what you ask for, guys. LabVIEW 20.4 will be sentient and after your jobs. :-)

[Darren]

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Jun 17 2008, 04:28 PM)

Careful what you ask for, guys. LabVIEW 20.4 will be sentient and after your jobs. :-)

Yup, and as many of you may recall, LabVIEW 4.20 was after your munchies...

-D

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE (Darren @ Jun 17 2008, 02:35 PM)

Yup, and as many of you may recall, LabVIEW 4.20 was after your munchies...

You wacky Austin hippies.

(I'm just a couple miles from Haight-Ashbury, myself.)

[Yair]

QUOTE (Darren @ Jun 17 2008, 10:27 PM)

...he could add a feature in the next LabVIEW release that allowed me to write VIs faster than ever before, without having to ever bring up the palettes again.

And if someone was free from worrying about long release cycles and didn't care about polishing it, he could have been using such a feature http://forums.lavag.org/A-LabVIEW-tool-suggestion-t8976.html' target="_blank">for months . I wouldn't say I don't remember what the palettes look like, but it has been very useful.