@Mads wrote:
A good example is the fact that one of the most popular ideas ever was the idea to adjust the design of the boolean constant. Altenbach, who came up with that idea, have received less kudos for other ideas that I'm sure would give him (and us) much higher benefits. Popularity and greatness are very often two different things.
Although I get your general point, having used LV 2010 in beta for the last few months, the improvement of readability of diagrams brought by the boolean constant change cannot be understated. Tons of VIs have arrays of boolean constants on them, have boolean constants squeezed into small corners, etc, and the redesign has helped A LOT.
Speaking to your general point -- my goal was to find low-ranked ideas that I felt would have significant developer impact and give people a second chance to review those ideas. Are there other ideas among the 1000 that are worth doing? Sure. I tried to find a broad enough set that people could actually make a meaningful choice of what to kudos (any fewer and it would be akin to "hey, everyone, come vote for this particular idea"). And it does rely upon my opinion -- though I tried to use my professional opinion as someone who regularly hears user feedback to promote ideas that I think users would generally like, as opposed to my personal opinion as a LV developer to improve the areas of LV that I personally use a lot.
I know that customers like it when NI is responsive to its demands. I know that NI knows this and so is proactively trying to address concerns that make it high on the Idea Exchange. LV 2010 is coming out in August. If you look at the ideas that are tagged "In Beta", you can see the responsiveness of NI. As we start work on the next version of LV (or rather, full time work, since future versions of LV are always already in work -- we are a parallel language in so many ways), we're going to go find the next batch of ideas to implement. But I also know that there can be user fatigue with the Idea Exchange's massive amount of content. That fatigue can lead to a strange situation where NI addresses the high flying concerns and, users are still left feeling they didn't quite get what they wanted, but they maybe can't say why because, after all, NI implemented the high kudos ideas. I cherry picked some ideas that, if implemented, I think would get a lot of people saying, "Yes, LV is now better" as a way of avoiding some of that fatigue effect. Is it a list of earthshattering ideas that revolutionize LV? No. It is a list of incremental improvements that should affect lots of people and make LV recognizably better to its users.
