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Rules for using Modern/Classic/Silver controls


wrote:

I spend a decent amount of time on UI and UX design and am proud of the intuitive and well scaling UIs I've made.  


Hold up, how do you make your vi's scale well? Whenever I try to have a resizeable UI, it becomes trial by property nodes. 

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Message 11 of 20
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Hi Gentleman,

 

use splitter bars!

 

check.png

Do you spot all the splitters on this front panel?

 

And yes, I prefer System controls for UI…

Best regards,
GerdW


using LV2016/2019/2021 on Win10/11+cRIO, TestStand2016/2019
Message 12 of 20
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7?  Not sure what my record is but it is probably on the order of 15 or so.  Yes working with panes is a pain but having resizing be handled by LabVIEW when it can makes things so much easier.  BTW nice looking UI.  If I were to do anything I'd just color the panes and splitters a system window color which on Windows is generally white to increase contrast.

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Message 13 of 20
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Hi Hooovahh,

 

it's already the standard Windows window background color…

(in the LabVIEW colortool it is System->"Panel and objects" color)

Best regards,
GerdW


using LV2016/2019/2021 on Win10/11+cRIO, TestStand2016/2019
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Message 14 of 20
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Oh so it is.  I generally just stick with the window color for the main content of the window, where other controls are, and the panel color for the outside.  Sorta like how Windows dialogs are like this.

 

1425.FilePropertiesUnblock.png

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Message 15 of 20
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wrote:

I was talking with a friend about LabVIEW and when we use different control types in our vi's

 

Generally, we agree that an end user should see modern/silver controls while base level vi's are best represented with the classic controls. (except cases where you want to make a cluster truly transparent) 

 

 

When do you use the various control styles and why ?


 

Quite frankly all three are fugen ugly but my lack of artistic ability leads me to making bland, unexciting front panels based usually on a mixture of Modern and Silver controls.

 

In order of ugliness:

  1. Classic (I avoid at all costs and upgrade all old sub-vi's to modern, except for the borderless String Indicator)
  2. Modern (I hate the "sunken" look indicators have but the Modern LED's are the best so use them a lot)
  3. Silver (IMHO Looks the best but the large borders makes things like an array of meter Indicators take up too much space) 

Please kudo my suggestion on Front Panel Color Schemes or skins  

 

========================
=== Engineer Ambiguously ===
========================
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Message 16 of 20
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For visible frontpanels I like to use:

- system controls (very nice on Windows 10).

- customized flat controls (self-made and other sets already mentioned in this thread).

- customized flat buttons created from flat icon SVGs.

 

I hate most silver controls. IMHO these are just too big.

 

Jens

Kudos are welcome...
Message 17 of 20
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Oh if you like SVG booleans you should checkout my Vector Boolean Creator.  It shows a list of images that you pick from (just a list of PNGs for the display) and can filter based on the image name, then select the button type (flat and system are a couple) then it generates a button that has a decal that is a vector image that scales with the button pretty well.  Here is a video I made showing it off.  The source of the images are SVGs that are converted to EMF and PNG using command line calls to inkscape.

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Message 18 of 20
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Thanks for the link & hint. We wrote a tool at our company for internal use for that feature. It can create buttons with hover effect in a specified size and a specified color scheme (e.g. company colors of the customer).

Jens

Kudos are welcome...
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Message 19 of 20
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 I'm a bit late to this thread, but... here's my two cents!

 

For GUI design, I used to rely heavily on silver controls, but have since switched to system.  Since Windows 10, it seems users are expecting cleaner, flat UIs and the system controls are great for that.  I also use the "UI Control Suite: System Controls 2.0" from NI to complement the system controls.

 

On the other hand, I agree with Hooovahh about sub-vis.  Controls generated by right click, and controls generated by shift-d are always created as modern.  It just seems ugly and cumbersome to try and change them to some preferred style on UIs that likely will never be seen again after I'm done writing them.

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Message 20 of 20
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