Why is the decorations so limited?

[falkpl]

Rolf,

Exactly what I am thinking.  This PICC is archaic and you are stuck with the small pallet of choices for customizing controls, Xcontrold is an overkill when you just want to make more elaborate controls.  I just want some more functionality than the PICC offers, as well as an editor to customize the shapes and some possible enhancments like a larger color pallet rotation and ability to get references to the object without calling its parent and using the index (which changes duriung development).  After 20 years it is time for an upgrad to this basic functionality.  I understand that with labview there is almost always a way to do what I need and I am not attacking NI or labview here.  I am looking for increader productivity.  It would be nice if I want a native (not an imported image) of some arbitrary shape that I could use a native editable decoration.  I have various solutions but they all take more time than they are worth to implement.  I put this post out there to get the communities opinion on the topic, and appreciate everyone's input.  Thank you.

Paul

[rolfk]

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falkpl wrote:

Rolf,

Exactly what I am thinking.  This PICC is archaic and you are stuck with the small pallet of choices for customizing controls, Xcontrold is an overkill when you just want to make more elaborate controls.  I just want some more functionality than the PICC offers, as well as an editor to customize the shapes and some possible enhancments like a larger color pallet rotation and ability to get references to the object without calling its parent and using the index (which changes duriung development).  After 20 years it is time for an upgrad to this basic functionality.  I understand that with labview there is almost always a way to do what I need and I am not attacking NI or labview here.  I am looking for increader productivity.  It would be nice if I want a native (not an imported image) of some arbitrary shape that I could use a native editable decoration.  I have various solutions but they all take more time than they are worth to implement.  I put this post out there to get the communities opinion on the topic, and appreciate everyone's input.  Thank you.

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I think you misunderstood me a little here. PICC in itself may be archaic but it is not limited to the choices you have in the LabVIEW palette. It is a full vector oriented graphics format so anything that can be representated with vectors could be done. However it is a static format so no animations would be possible other than resizing.

But then if you want custom programmable animation there is not really a good format anyhow (or more accurately the existing 3D OpenGL animations you can do in a picture control are probably as good as it can get).

Defining a graphic format that you could create in a static graphic editor and then arbitrarily animate using property nodes or whatever wouldn't be much easier to handle and a lot of work to do for the LabVIEW programmers. What I always wanted is a simple graphics editor that would allow me to create such PICC static vector graphic images and then replace parts of controls with my own graphics.

If I would know how to hook into LabVIEW and the exact format of those PICCs I would have done something like that a long time ago. But for all I know there is no way to hook somewhere to do this stuff.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[falkpl]

Sorry for the misunderstanding.  Either way a simple vector graphics editor could help.  Too bad that the format is not more standard.

[rolfk]

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falkpl wrote:

Sorry for the misunderstanding.  Either way a simple vector graphics editor could help.  Too bad that the format is not more standard.

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In fact the format alone isn't the big problem. I've tried to look into that and had some successs decoding it. However the problem is that there is no hook in LabVIEW as far as I'm aware of to get at that information so you could retrieve and replace control parts graphics.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[falkpl]

OK I got it, the PICC does provide many of the features a I want in a decoration there is just no way to edit the decorations provided by labview.  I wonder why NI didnt use a more oprn approach to this.  A decoration folder with standard editable decorations would allow much more customization of controls.  An open format would allow us to even create decorations with 3rd party editors and easily import them to labview.

[rolfk]

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falkpl wrote:
OK I got it, the PICC does provide many of the features a I want in a decoration there is just no way to edit the decorations provided by labview.  I wonder why NI didnt use a more oprn approach to this.  A decoration folder with standard editable decorations would allow much more customization of controls.  An open format would allow us to even create decorations with 3rd party editors and easily import them to labview.

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There wasn't at all and still isn't really a good platform independant vector graphics format. Remember LabVIEW 3.0 which was the first multiplatform version of LabVIEW was released in 1992. Many things they had done before using native MacOS techniques had to be ported to a form that could work too on non Macs. And so they invented all kind of stuff.

You can easily import pictures even PICTs on the Mac and EMFs on Windows but when being displayed on a non native platform all sorts of strange artefacts can happen.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[le saint]

bonjour,

je suis etudiant et pour mon stage de fin d'etude j'ai utiliser ton programme

de customisation de bouton. Mais pour cree un exé je ne peut l'utiliser

car j'ai differents conflits j'utilise la version 8.6

[le saint]

merci de m'aider