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