MathScript Nugget #20: MathScript Probe Improvements in LabVIEW 2010

[jattas]

At NIWeek this year, National Instruments introduced LabVIEW 2010. As usual, MathScript released a new version at the same time. In honor of the occasion, I'll begin a short series of nuggets on the new features in MathScript.

The new features I'll cover in this post are some nice little improvements to the usability of the MathScript Probe (previously introduced in MathScript Nugget #7). Most of these improvements were inspired by suggestions in a forum posting by MathScript user us09 (aka Ulf). MathScript may not have its own Idea Exchange like LabVIEW does, but that won't stop R&D from implementing some of the great ideas that our users send our way.

Ulf's first idea was to display the value of your scalar variables instead of the dimension in the Variables tree. We now do this for many different datatypes: numeric and logical scalars, 1D arrays that are smaller than a few elements, and strings. Variables that are too large to preview will show their dimension as they did before. These changes also apply to the Variables tab of the MathScript Window. I've been using this feature in beta versions of 2010 and have found it to make debugging much smoother.

Another simple suggestion from Ulf was the ability to shrink undocked variable displays. Previously you could grow these displays to see more of your data, but you could not shrink them smaller than their original (quite large) size. This meant that undocking several variables would quickly eat up your screen real estate. In LabVIEW 2010, you can resize the Numeric (non-graph) displays down to 1 or 2 cells so many more of them can fit on your screen.



The last suggestion that made it into LabVIEW 2010 was to automatically select the best display based on the data type of the variable selected. Now if you select a string variable, you'll get the string display. It's so logical you've got to wonder why we didn't think of this sooner!

If you have any ideas about ways to improve MathScript, please post them on these forums or the Idea Exchange. As this nugget shows, they just might make it into the next version of LabVIEW!

jattas
LabVIEW MathScript R&D

ps Check out more MathScript Nuggets!