LabVIEW Idea Exchange

[#1]

Problem:

Lets say you're writing a VI for stopping a process. Wanting the icon function to be recognizable at a glance, you open the icon editor and go to glyphs looking for this:

You type "stop"... nothing... hmm. After muttering a few curses, you either trudge through the whole icon library, or you draw one.

Turns out you should have written "abort"! Oops. Not really intuitive.

Solution:

Turns out the glyph search is fairly useful. It can see if your search is in any part of the glyph file name. If the above glyph was named "abort stop.png", the search would have succeeded.

Glyphs would be a lot easier to find if they contain the noun and a handful of verbs that they represent. For example:

"support.png"   -> "support checkmark yes.png" (support?)

"keep.png"     -> "keep checkmark yes.png" (keep?)

"create.png"     -> "create new.png"

"file.png"         -> "file disk save.png"

Alternate Solution:

Impliment tags into the glyph library with the ability to add new tags to current glyphs. This would avoid long file names.

[#2]

Great idea!

[#3]

Maybe a bigger icon package or organize the icon packs a little more intuitively too.

[#4]

Thank you! You have no idea how many times I've seached for "check" or "checkmark" wanting "keep.png"

I think the tags are the best solution, as it won't break anything where people look for those filenames elsewhere in code.

[#5]

Awesome

[#6]

I'd agree with tags, this is well needed.  

Some others that get me every time:

Function:   (Actually expressionbrowse.png)

Arrow:    ((Actually get.png, set.png, vector.png or any of the other 20 glyphs with arrows in them)

[#7]

Meaningful icons in 10 seconds or less: In Google image search type in *.png and what you want (check or keep or etc) and specify image size of 32x32 pixels. You'll get a ton of images. Right-click the image, copy and paste in icon editor.

[#8]

I have been using http://findicons.com/, but I'll have to try google as well. Good tip

From findicons, I download the png, alter the name like the examples above, and place it in the glyph directory. I figured if I have to do it, I only want to do it once. I've already reused most of my icons.

[#9]

IMHO searching icons in Internet is not a great idea. Purpose of an icon in LabVIEW is making the code more readable. Internet contains millions of icons for each common need. Would it be good, for example, to see new "Stop" icon in each project that you eventually open? I do not think so.