Do not release "official" new control suite until suite is complete

[PaulG.]

More of a complaint than an idea. The Silver and system controls schemes looks really good but they are far too incomplete to use it in a GUI. I can't tell how many times I've started a UI with one style of controls then abandoned it because the mix and match look looks like hell. How much trouble would it be to create a new control (or create existing controls) in every style? It would certainly make NI/LabVIEW *look* better. And we should not have to rely on interest groups, either.

[SimonH]

Paul,

I understand your frustration, let me try to explain why we made the decisions we made. 

As far as the Silver controls go we know the tab control is a big omission but are there others you find yourself needing?  The tab control is more difficult on the implementation side and we weren't comfortable trying to squeeze it into LabVIEW 2011.  Faced with the decision to a) ship what we had without a tab control or b) wait until such time where we had everything we decided to go with a) with the caveat that we would not make the Silver controls the default.  We hoped we'd please more of our customers with the option of new, nicer controls than we'd frustrate by their incompleteness and we wanted to give people the option of using them now, rather than forcing everyone to wait. Over time we would like to make the Silver palette cover the same use-cases as the Classic and Modern palettes, although there may never be direct control for control replacements (just as the Classic and Modern palettes don't overlap 100%).

The System controls are a bit of a different beast as they aren't a "skin" or themed set of LabVIEW controls.  They are the OS defined controls that are common in most OSs.  We provide a LabVIEW interface to them but we do not define how they look.  Specifically,  LabVIEW doesn't have a "System Waveform Graph" because Windows (or Mac OSX, or Linux, whatever the "System" is) does not define how to display a graph.  You mentioned the UI Interest Group where I posted a set of controls which look like System equivalents of popular LabVIEW controls such as graphs.  We thought long and hard about including those in the product and ultimately decided not to because they are not actually System controls and would not behave as expected in all scenarios (i.e. future OS releases, custom OS themes, high-contrast themes, non-Windows OSs).  We try to prioritize run-time correctness and portability over things that can be corrected at edit-time.

I don't intend this post as an excuse; just an explaination of our decisions.  If this idea gets a lot of kudos then we'll know for future decisions which way our user community wants us to drive the product and we'll do our best to oblige.

Regards,

Simon H

LabVIEW Product Manager

[X.]

You've got all the excuses you want: just cite Apple's policy (which is nothing but Microsoft's of old) of releasing new software which are truly glorified betas and fixing the bugs or missing features in version 2, 3, 4 until it becomes a decent app... (I am refering to FCPX, for instance).

🙂

The Silver controls need some ironing indeed (I just posted a tentative bug report here).I'd say I am missing an IMAQ image control, a Picture control, a 3D Graph control, OK/Cancel Booleans, Check box, etc, etc.

[X.]

Sorry, I meant to say 3D Picture, not 3D Graph (which is a distinct beast altogether).

[AristosQueue (NI)]

X: They also didn't add any controls where it was felt that the silver would look the same as existing controls, i.e., the various picture controls (3d, 2d and IMAQ), checkbox, radio. You have OK and Cancel buttons in Silver at the bottom of the Booleans palette -- they don't have text on them, which was the style picked for Silver.

[X.]

Fair enough.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

X: Having said that, it occurs to me that we probably should *copy* those controls from the existing palettes into the Silver so they're all in the same place.

[X.]

You mean the so-called "Blank Button"? Yeah, well, I don't like it that much personally (the gradient pattern is not very subtle, it turns orange when pressed) and you still have to type the boolean text in it (extra work).

I use the System buttons for the booleans I mentioned above, they are doing the job. And the Cancel and OK buttons are there to grab without additional effort. I guess I could customize the palette.

As far as the 2D and  3D Picture and Image controls, I would precisely hope that their Silver version would look slightly sexier than the kind of extruded plastic objects of the "Modern" palette. You know, brushed Aluminum, retina display...

In any case, food for thought for a future version...

[X.]

Another related discussion here...