Improve LabVIEW appearance

[vpicco]

LabVIEW on just looks awful. Here's a little gallery of horrors. In my opinion it makes LabVIEW looks very unprofessional. These are all taken from a "stock" LV2016 Full license, installed on Windows 7, taken from some of the windows I see all the time. This list could go on forever!

A lot of these problems seem to originate from using LabVIEW-style controls and indicators into its own windows and panels, which are not rendered correctly. Please save LabVIEW from itself!

[elset191]

I thought the below was the case, because that's what messes up all of my non-LVer-coworkers displays when they open a VI.  However, I just tested the VI Properties windows and everything seems ok.  Maybe there's something else at play in your configuration, but I'm not sure what.

When I adjust the display settings, I do see what you show in the Example Finder window though.

--My original Post--

Most, if not all, of these issues go away if you tell Windows to zoom 100%, instead of 125% or 150%, in the Display settings.

[vpicco]

I don't think that changing the appearance of my whole system should be an acceptable solution to LabVIEW's problems dealing with it. Other professional programs, such as MATLAB, work well with 125% and look much better. Also, 125% is the default Windows 7 setting, so I would expect LabVIEW to render correctly under default display settings. And zoom does not solve poor UI design which plagues the whole LabVIEW system (buttons design and placement, menus, inconsistent graphical elements, fonts, etc.)

[X.]

Get ready to be told that your monitor display settings are wrong too.

Like someone said before: "don't use it that way"...

[fabric]

Definite kudos.

I can't recall seeing LV render this badly but I do remember experiencing similar issues with a previous laptop (running at 125% zoom, as is often required with the small high-res displays common on modern laptops).

We recently shipped an application for a 4K display which was a disaster. We desperately wanted to increase the OS zoom to make the menu bars more clickable but that wreaked so much havoc with LV that we gave up. Now that app is just stuck with disproportionately tiny menu bars...

[elset191]

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@fabric wrote:

We recently shipped an application for a 4K display which was a disaster. We desperately wanted to increase the OS zoom to make the menu bars more clickable but that wreaked so much havoc with LV that we gave up. Now that app is just stuck with disproportionately tiny menu bars...

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LabVIEW certainly falls apart on a 4K display.  I had a similar experience, but we were utilizing the touch features, so I nixed the menu bar and created a menu similar to what you find on a phone.  I think I had the zoom set to 150%.

I still do all of my development on a 1080p monitor, so my zoom settings are set to 100% and everything looks as nice as could be expected.  LV is not ready for the 4K revolution yet, but I understand NI is working on it.  LV2020 perhaps

[ChrisStrykesAgain]

With regards to the font size concerns (and as someone who uses a 4K display with 250% DPI scaling on a regular basis):

Windows 7 does not do scaling well. Windows 7 is difficult to configure for high-resolution displays, to the point that I have given up.

That being said, it seems that DPI scaling and system font size are independent properties in Windows 7. You might check out a similar question on the Microsoft support forums or maybe this one on SuperUser.

Using a modern OS, things are much better. I run Windows 10 as my base OS and when the primary monitor (4K) is set at 250%, most things look pretty good. LabVIEW included. I’m not saying LabVIEW is perfect (it’s a little fuzzy), but I have no complaints when comparing it to other common (non-NI) software products.

When I attach external monitors (1080p) and use non-uniform display scaling, things get a bit goofy when I have LabVIEW on the secondary monitors, but to keep things in perspective, until a few months ago Skype for Business was unusable on anything other than the primary and Powerpoint (editing) is still bad.

Finally, we do recognize that more people are using high resolutions displays as time goes on and that is being taken in to consideration as we release new versions.