Improved Listbox Icons

[YoungZaphod]

The standard LabVIEW listbox control has very archaic icons. So I made some improvements. You can use this control as a direct replacement for the standard control, but it looks a lot better.

This takes advantage of the properties for the listbox to load your own custom graphics.

Download from Seneca5

[JeffreyH]

Thanks Craig, very nice!

One suggestion for improvement is to make the backgrounds of the symbols transparent so it also displays nicely if selection mode is set to highlight the entire row.

[YoungZaphod]

Transparency is a great idea. I tried it, but it didn't seem to work for listbox icons. It appeared that LabVIEW does not support the transparency within a listbox (at least in LV 8.5, which I used for this). Back in LV 7, there was no PNG transparency at all. Is that possible that it is still not supported in some instances? Or perhaps something is going wrong between loading the icons from the file and inserting them into the control? Any thoughts?

[Thoric]

With a little effort you can create a mask from the background colour for each symbol, then re-insert it into the listbox. Loop this for each symbol and you have transparent symbols!

[JeffreyH]

Don't know about 8.5.. I did a quick test in 8.6 by loading some images (png) of the Nuovola theme in a listbox.

These all have transparent BG's and this looks very nice, like in Thoric's post.

[YoungZaphod]

You are right, it does work! I tried it a different way and transparency does work, even in 8.5.

There doesn't appear to be any difference between it and 8.6. The problem was something else: To make it easy to load all of the icons, I made one file with the icons all in a line. I have LV code to load it in, break it apart, and assign the icons to each of the listbox elements. It makes it easier to edit than dealing with a bunch of files.

However, the Get Image Subset.VI that I use to break the image into 16x16 icons strips off the alpha from the PNG. In goes the full 32-bit image, out comes the subset at 24-bit. Fortunately Get Image Subset.VI has code (in which you can see that the alpha is explicitly stripped off), so maybe I'll make a modified version of it when I get some time. Or maybe I'll just load file by file.

[kalyanramuv]

Nice updated control box. How did you modify the standard labview icons?

[Luiz Maia]

Hello,

Is there a way to reuse your icons on a multicolumn listbox?

Thank you

[YoungZaphod]

Sure...

http://www.seneca5.com/blog/2010/03/better-multicolumn-listbox-icons/