To Labview or not to labview

[Greg_Shipley]

I am facing a large decision, to continue developement with labview or to move on to .NET or Delphi.
The desire to move comes from the simple fact that .NET and Delphi applications 'look' more like windows applications both in appearance and operation. What I am talking about are the menus for file, edit,printing that we are so used to with such packages as Excel and the like.
I tend to use labview in the following way: write an application and distribute it to MANY clients running everything from 98 to XP. I just feel labview is moving away from this sort of application and National Instruments is not picking up the ball on making the front end of VIs run more like windows applications. I have called national instruments and scrubbed the web looking for information and have really turned up little. before I just jump off the labview wagon that I have happily been on for 7 years now I would like to hear input from the group.
Running 7.1 on WIN2000 for development.

Greg

[Johnner]

Greg,

You will surely get responses on both sides of this issue. When I first did some LabVIEW consulting about eight years ago, the guy I was working with was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to make LabVIEW "look more like a Windows app." At that time, of course, there were no menus of any kind other than the ones you kludged together yourself with a ring control and then cursed for not looking very good and for taking up processing overhead for polling. Also, there was no native checkbox object, no tree control, etc, etc. I can't recall how extensive the "dialog controls" palette was back then, but it was presumably much emptier than today.

My personal opinion is that LabVIEW has been pretty good about introducing features and widgets that make it easier to create Windows-looking apps (and Mac-looking apps, and I suppose Linux-looking apps, for that matter). However, I haven't done any real VB or VC++ or .NET development in recent years to provide a strong point of reference.

So, I'm interested in a little more detail about where you see LabVIEW falling short on the "looks and feels like a Windows app" front. What exactly is it about the menu or printing behavior that doesn't quite cut the mustard? I know this is a general topic that the developers very actively solicit feedback about, so I think highly specific comments are best.

My two cents,
John

[Greg_Shipley]

Well things that come to mind,
1. The buttons used in labview do not look like the buttons used in 'windows type apps' specifically excel.
2. The menu I refer to is the common windows menu that is at the top of internet explorer allowing for easy navigation to functions such as save, print and similar.
3. Also, take a look at a graph in labview and a graph in Excel. Not the same, however a graph in Delphi looks exactly like the one in Excel. The labview graph works, but again, the appearance issue.

I know labview is for engineers and the like, being one myself it has been quite useful over the years, but I think National Instruments could cash in big if they gave it the look of .NET but kept is simple to program.
Applications written in .NET or Delphi are just dressier I guess and that is where I need to be somehow.
An example is, I got the $99 intro version of Delphi and wrote an application that has all the features and appearance of notepad.exe in windows, looks and runs just like it I do not see how to do the same in labview. Obviously I need to be able to do more than just create a simple text editor, but hopefully you all get the direction I am going here.

Will comment more if needed.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Well, since LabVIEW is cross platform and not strictly Windows, I suspect that you'll always see some differences from apps that depend on the Windows API. The MAC/Linux/Sun users complain about how Windows centric LabVIEW is right now with a lot of functions tied to things to ActiveX. Personally, I think LabVIEW comes pretty close to emulating a Windows look and feel with some small minor differences. I like that each new version of LabVIEW adds more and more dialog type controls that have made the differences less noticeable. With a little bit of work, things can be made better. For example, the pull-down menus can be changed so that they call the Windows API. For other things, like loss of Windows 98 support, there's not much you can do except support an older LabVIEW version. According to what NI has said, Microsoft announced they were dropping support of Win98 and NI decided to follow suit. When Microsoft changed their mind, it was too late to change 7.1 in time for it's release.

Are there some specifics that you don't like about the LabVIEW windows? LabVIEW programmers have done some pretty amazing stuff. Maybe you'll find an answer if you say exactly what you need.

[Greg_Shipley]

Let me be clear, not bagging on LV or NI, just trying to point out what I am faced with believe me, I do not want to go to .NET.

A little more specifics.

1. Ability to put graphics on buttons like a printer icon ect.
2. Ability to have text and objects resize correctly between screen resolutions.
3. Ability to have printing not affected by screen resolution.
4. Ability to have a menu, button scheme that looks like Outlook and other applications in the windows world.

People are used to this and just hard to charge $400 - $1000 for a software package that does not have that look and feel.

comments welcome.

greg

[Dennis_Knutson]

1. LabVIEW has had the ability to add graphics to Booleans for quite some time. Select customize and you can import pictures.
4. I don't know how to add those little icons like Outlook's pull down menus but toolbars are easy to do with customized Booleans. You could also use an ActiveX control. I don't know how Delphi does it, but in Visual Studio, menus, buttons, etc. are all ActiveX controls so you could do things just like the programmers at Microsoft do.

[rolfk]

Greg Shipley wrote:

> Let me be clear, not bagging on LV or NI, just trying to point out
> what I am faced with believe me, I do not want to go to .NET.<br><br>

Welcome in the club!

> A little more specifics.<br><br>
> 1. Ability to put graphics on buttons like a printer icon ect.<br>

I do this regularly with the custom control editor.

> 2. Ability to have text and objects resize correctly between screen
> resolutions.

I doubt Windows applications do in general much better than what LabVIEW
does when scaling one specific control to the screen and moving the rest
along. The only possible problem here is that LabVIEW does iteratively
calulate the new positions, instead of in relation to the original size,
so resizing panels abusively back and forth will introduce some control
creep due to rounding errors.

Scaling the entire front panel with all its objects including text is
simply an almost hopeless thing to do under Windows. Restricting
rescaling to one control only (this is in fact what applications like
excel do as well) however works quite satisfactorily.

> 3. Ability to have printing not affected by screen resolution.<br>

Using a PS printer and selecting Postscript output in LabVIEW should fix
that problem. But hairline plots will be hairline then and that can be
very thin.

> 4. Ability to have a menu, button scheme that looks like Outlook and
> other applications in the windows world.

Do you mean those icons in the menu? I consider this a very questionable
UI element but yes LabVIEW does not support this yet.

As to those button schemes of Outlook and other Windows applications:
They are mostly MS applciations and those features are often not
supported by the OS but simply MS specific extensions to their
applications. If it is a good idea to try to copy all those elements in
every single application seems also questionable to me.

> People are used to this and just hard to charge $400 - $1000 for a
> software package that does not have that look and feel.

Well to be honest I feel it may be more difficult to sell an application
for 100$ without those features, than one for 1000$ or more. I'm
admittingly working almost always in the range beyond 1000$ and there
the latest MS ideas about UI design are usually not very important.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Johnner]

Greg,

It may be that we're assuming an awareness of certain LabVIEW features that you may not have. So, pardon me if this is all old hat, but I wanted to make sure to cover them:

- You can get 90% of the way home, in terms of making the widgets on your VI look standard for your OS, if you stick to the "Dialog Controls" control palette. If you're not in the habit of dropping most of your new panel controls from there, you should definitely get into that habit, and you may find that you've solved most of your problem.

- The LabVIEW run-time menu is really a great feature that produces fairly standard Windows-looking results. Just in case you're not intimately familiar with these menus, then make sure to go to Help >> Find Examples and check out the menu examples under Building User Interfaces >> Menus and Toolbars. You are correct that LabVIEW does not currently support adding graphics alongside the choices (I don't think), but you might notice that not all Windows applications actually do this either. For example, Internet Explorer (sure the most familiar Windows app of all!) avoids graphics unless the user selects the Favorites menu.

Just for kicks, I wanted to see how well I could mimic an Excel dialog in LabVIEW. I chose the Chart Wizard, and I've attached my LabVIEW analog. Just by using the Dialog Controls, I was able to crank out widgets (tab control, listbox, string indicator, buttons) that look almost perfect (I run XP). The chart-related images in the listbox were a problem, so I had to resort to using the Tree Control, which permits custom images. I could not make the images left-justify, because the tree control is reserving some space for the tree hierarchy lines and collapse/expand elements. It wasn't simple to get custom images in there, but I followed the lead of this Traversing Tree Controls and Setting Custom Symbols example. The chart sub-type choices are just buttons with imported images--easy to do in the Control Editor.

The real difficulty would be making the thing behave correctly in response to the user's actions--showing a new set of chart sub-types, ensuring that only one chart sub-type at a time could be selected, etc. All this would take time and effort that might not be worth it. And indeed, if the most important feature of your project is to have it look and feel as much like Excel, Outlook, etc, as possible with minimal programming overhead, then you may well be better served to do the project in some other development environment.

Another two cents,
John

[becktho]

Hi guys

I read through this thread and I think it's very interesting, that some guys want to have their LV look like MS applications.

If I develop a user interface, I just use LV controls and color them with system-colors. For me it is an advantage that the application does not look like it was a MS product.

I experienced users who were a little bit more confident about the LV app than about MS apps. Sometimes I develop in Java and there I also made the same experience.
I also experienced users who did not just "click around" in the software. In a usual MS app they just click around if something does not work as they want it to. In my LV apps, they are more careful and call me if they have a problem (ok my software is just used in our company). But I'd rather like a user who calls me, than a "wild clicking" one who curses about my app, which he seems to be so familiar with.

Although I just develop for windows targets, it's clear to me that the user should see that the application is different to windows and MS at all.

Thomas

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

Greg:

Do your applications use data acquisition cards (analog/digital I/O), VISA (GPIB, Serial), complex math operations, data graphing/presentation, parallel execution of loops, rapid prototying, extensive library of instrument drivers, etc? It think you see where I am going with this. These areas are where LabView shines. I do not think it was meant to look like Windows, but rather rapid application developement for test and automation. If you have no use for these features (you did not mention what kind of programs you develop in LV) then go for alternative IDE's. I save a preview screen capture for LabView 8, it looks quite a bit like MS Visual Studio. Just my chime in.

Good Luck!