drafting-like mouse cursor, menus, routing, and layers

[EngrStudent]

A number of years ago I worked as a drafter.  The software that we used at the time had several features that LabVIEW might find advantageous to consider.  It is also worth mentioning that some of these ideas are multiple decades old so while a copyright may exist for a particular design style, the patents (if they existed) are no longer in force.  That means that you can copy the general function as NI, and copyright the design. 

These include:

• "Fence" selection - when a left-to-right selection box is made, only objects inside it are selected, but when a right-to-left selection is used, anything crossing the "fence" of the selection box is selected.  This allows single-move selection instead of control-click each, or other ergonomic (and speed reducing) methods.
•  "Control-click menus".  Hold control and right-click and a new set of quick menus happen.  This means that instead of moving the mouse to the menu-bar you can get to the most useful items with quick actions.  Again - ergonomics and speed.  If they can be user-customized, all the better.
• "Zoom in and out".  Multiple scales are important for visual languages.  
• "Via's".  Yes it is from routing electrical circuits, but having a "magic manhole" that wires go into and out of to visually handle intersections in an intuitive manner is going to make things cleaner.  One of the things that naturally come with via's is layers.  The metaphor for the block diagram is a piece of paper, but what about translucency?  Layers might give an intuitive metaphor to sub-vi's that make them more accessible.

As I do more of this work, and more of the "I wish they had that" come to mind, I hope to append them to this thread.

Best regards.

[crossrulz]

1. Duplicate: Selection of Items on BD or FP needs to be Easier!

2. Interesting idea.  But NI is working on something that I think is a better answer.

3. Duplicated so many times.  But the original is here: Add a zoom function (yes, I said zoom. So sue me)

4. Layers will just make things harder to understand.  It is like hiding code.

FYI, it is best for the idea exchange to have a single idea per thread.  This makes it easier for NI to prioritize a specific feature.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Tangent: it's generally best if multiple unrelated ideas are separate entries on the exchage so they can be handled independently. Not critical, but helpful.

• "Via's".  Yes it is from routing electrical circuits, but having a "magic manhole" that wires go into and out of to visually handle intersections in an intuitive manner is going to make things cleaner.

R&D generally thinks that this would create significant readability problems for LabVIEW. Things that jump without wires are things like local varialbes and global variables, which are deliberate breaks in the dataflow and come with performance overhead and parallelism risk. Getting an appearance for a "this diagram only hyperjump that still behaves like a wire but doesn't draw like one" might be possible but is hard.

When we observe our users, we see that the visual connection between related bits of code is so valuable for diagram readability that we're actually working on features that go the other way -- encoding the things that currently are data jumps as a user-drawn visual connection.

I do not mean to imply that we would never implement this kind of hyperjump feature (that's what I call it). It's been proposed elsewhere on the Idea Exchange, though I cannot find the link at this time. And we in R&D do return to the idea from time to time. But the major difference between a circuit diagram and VI diagrams in this regard is that circuits never have off-diagram side-effects, where as VI diagrams do, so in a circuit, a jump can only mean one thing, whereas in VIs, it could mean one of two things. It would require caution to make it work visually.

[crossrulz]

AristosQueue, I think this is the idea you were looking for: Allow breaking up long wires with labels in each end

There are others, but I think this is the original.

[X.]

Some wiring ideas

[Darren]

Any idea that has not received any kudos within a year after posting will be automatically declined.

[EngrStudent]

@Daren - while that is economically efficient, it is not the same as innovative. 

References to consider your paradigm:

• https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce?language=en
• Steve Jobs Quote:
  "But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."  - BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)
• "People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."  The Guts of a New Machine (30 November 2003)