Darren's Weekly Nugget 03/20/2006

[Darren]

I made this suggestion to somebody last week and they said it would make a good nugget, so here goes.  When you're using the coloring tool (also known as the paintbrush tool) on the panel, you can select a color by right clicking and finding the right color in the color picker.  However, there's a much easier way to pick the color for something, if that color already happens to exist somewhere else on your panel (or the panel of any other open VI).  While using the coloring tool, if you hold down the Ctrl key, you'll see that your paintbrush turns into a little "eye dropper" tool...around LabVIEW R&D we call this the "color sucker" because now, if you click anything with the eye dropper tool, it will copy the color of the object you clicked on to the paintbrush tool's color selector.  Now, when you release the Ctrl key, your paintbrush tool will use the color that you just Ctrl-clicked as the painting color.  Try it out!  It's quite a bit faster than right-clicking and using the color picker every time.

-D

P.S. - Check out past nuggets here.

[RM2]

That is a good tip. I have been using that since LV 6.1 although it probably existed before then. You can also use that same feature in the icon editor.

Keep the tips coming.

[kehander]

There's something that has puzzled me along these lines... Have you noticed that when you right-click a control with a configurable color and select Properties, you can't set the color to transparent in the resulting dialog? The T that you need to click gets replaced by an X to close the color picker!

Despite this, it is possible to get around this just by using the Paintbrush with the Transparent color selected. (Or of course you could wire a Transparent color box to the appropriate property node.)

[Darren]

Good call, this is a bug in the Properties dialog.  There is no reason you shouldn't be able to select a Transparent color there.  I have filed a bug report on this issue (reference #3VJED2F2), so we should see it fixed in a future LabVIEW version.

-D

[Odd_Modem]

I have never been able to sample the icon and then change the front panel to the same color. Is there a trick to this?

[parthabe]

hi All,

I'd like to share one more Tool to interchange the wires without deleting & rewiring, in two terminal icons like, Addition, Division, etc. Keep the wiring tool in one of the terminals & press the control key. u should be able to see a new tool like "8", with an arrow tip.Now click the mouse & the two terminals will get interchanged automatically. So easy way to rewire without deleting them. Just thought of sharing with others...

Partha.

[Darren]

You can copy a color from the icon relatively easily onto the color picker's "History" row.  In the icon editor, switch to the eye dropper tool, and click whatever color it is you want to copy from the icon.  Then close the icon editor, go to the front panel, switch to your paintbrush tool, and right click.  In the color picker, you'll see a "History" row at the bottom, and whatever color you copied from the icon should be the last color listed in the History row...you can then select this color so your panel is the same color as whatever you copied from the icon.

-D