No kudos on this one. The navigation window is very important for LabVIEW FPGA work where things like dynamic references, for loops, while loops... etc... don't work at all or the same. So you end up with very flat diagrams that would be "bad" in windows/RT but are the only way to do things in FPGA.
I get your point. But is that the last answer of NI with respect to enhancing FPGA programming? Help navigate humongous diagrams? I am using LV FPGA and I don't think I would want to use this approach to "help" me. I'll try to shrink my diagrams as much as I can, use subVIs, etc. But I may be convinced if you show me one of these diagrams that can't be shrunk. Of course the risk is that it will generate a flurry of suggestions to obviate this in the first place... For instance accessing all 160 inputs of the 7813R should be made more user-friendly than having to do this in 4 different subVIs just to avoid exploding diagrams:
The person before me at any given job may or may not have written good code.
When you're given code that is 7 screens x 7 screens the navigation panel is by far the most effective way to work. There's no way for me to know if the person before me used it or the scroll bars.
Someone will always write awful code no matter how difficult you make it. We can't eliminate all the tools we have to deal with it. I'll be the first to admit that it's tough to balance the tools that make it possible to write bad code and the tools that enable us to work with it.
Obviously, I could not care less whether or not the Navigation Window is kept or not since I do not use it. But it is interesting to know why people defend it...
There is nothing wrong with the navigation window, and sometimes it is the only way to navigate rube goldberg code posted in the forum. 🙂
It is also useful when debugging an application on some very limited hardware. For example I recently needed to debug one of my programs while running on a 1024x600 netbook. Since the program was developed on a more reasonable screen, the diagrams were way oversized relative to the small screen.
I am going along fine with scrollbars. I was shocked to discover the navigation window in the other thread I linked to, but later I recalled having used it briefly ages ago only to forget about it permanently. If NI is taking inspiration from Photoshop, I would recommend they implement floating palettes for all the tools they stack at the top of each window (alignment, font selection, text justification, etc). Now THAT would be useful.
Since nobbody seems to get it, this suggestion is IRONIC...
I have to quote this official statement (dated March 2011) justifying NI's decision to decline a Zoom function (which I don't feel the need for personally, but totally understand - the need, not the decision):
National Instruments is always investing in ways that make navigating the LabVIEW environment more intuitive and user friendly. Based on the customer expectation of how zooming features should work in software products, existing LabVIEW frameworks that make it difficult to fully meet those expectations, and other business decisions, we have decided to decline this idea. We have looked into this idea in the past and will continue to revisit it in the future but currently R&D won't be actively working to include it in the shipping LabVIEW product.
Curiously, this sentence was not censored by Lithium.
When *I* type "**bleep** you **bleep**", it spots the insult right away though...
Ideas for the removal of existing features (such as this one) need to meet a much higher threshold in general before getting implemented. You don't simply want to pull the rug from underneath longtime users that got used to it. Fortunately, nobody is forced to use it and non-users will never see it, so what's the point of removing it? Freeing up one keyboard shortcut? 😉
The implementation of the navigation window could problay be improved, but that would be a different idea. 😉 It should only be removed once a better alternative, such as zoom, is actually available. 🙂
