UI Interest Group Discussions
Advanced Vector graphics & Animations on LabVIEW...
Hello All:
BatchTest Corporation will be giving a live demonstration of our Pebbles UI toolkit for LabVIEW on February 10, 2015 at Bay Area LabVIEW User Group (BALUG) at National Instruments location in Santa Clara/CA. Pebbles UI brings Adobe technology to LabVIEW front-panel, introducing several suites of controls and indicators made using scalable vector graphics.
Attached is a snapshot of an example VI, controls & indicators on it are actual working components. All controls/indicators are scalable and since they are made using vector graphics, they retain crisp looks when they are resized. Pebbles UI also includes several custom functionality controls (such as an analog clock... or a rotation control which rotates a user graphic at a user-specified rotational speed, or to a user-specified angle.) Users can use their own vector graphics (.SVG and .AI) or bitmaps (.png, .jpg, .gif), rotation control can have transparent or user-specified background. Any feedback on improving the toolkit is highly appreciated! Currently we are finalizing the toolkit and packaging it for introduction to LVTN. A package contining demo VI for you to try out will be soon uploaded on our website, more information on the toolkit is at http://www.batchtest.com/pebbles-ui-for-labview/
(Above image shows just a few controls/indicators from Pebbles UI tookit, over 100 different components are available, each further configurable for colors/animation effects/etc.)
See you at BALUG on February 10th!
This is fantastic! Very exciting. I hope you can share the presentation with the rest of the world, perhaps video the meet and post on here for us?
I'm a bit fan of advancing the LabVIEW user interface, NI's offerings are woefully behind modern UI design and this is becoming ever-increasingly important in today's blend of commerce and consumer expectation.
Thank you, Thoric! Your generous comment is highly appreciated.
Our presentation will be posted on Feb 11 on this board, along with actual demo VIs that folks can download and run. Posting photographs of our toolkit loses more than half of the "cool factor" because a viewer can't see the subtle animations and "fluid" factor. A user also can't see in this photograph that our graphics does not deteriorate LabVIEW performance despite amazing animations because our graphics update thread is outside of LabVIEW (our engine works separately from LabVIEW in the background and directly writes on the screen using hardware acceleration and Adobe graphics technology).
We are going to put LabVIEW graphics far ahead of most other text-based programming platforms! 🙂
Thoric wrote:
This is fantastic! Very exciting. I hope you can share the presentation with the rest of the world, perhaps video the meet and post on here for us?
I'm a bit fan of advancing the LabVIEW user interface, NI's offerings are woefully behind modern UI design and this is becoming ever-increasingly important in today's blend of commerce and consumer expectation.
Thank you, Joey!
Our toolkit has a combination of several types, including all you mentioned (there are over 100 different types of controls/indicators/decorations, depending on which one you look at). In fact we also utilize VI-wrappers (transparent to a user) to accomplish some special types of functionality. Working with vector graphics is tricky (all done in the background) and some things can't be accomplished using custom controls. On the other hand, we are also very careful not to deteriorate LabVIEW performance so we have implemented some unique algorithms to get things done with the aid of all available LabVIEW options.
JoeySpinella wrote:
Nice work, BTC!
How are you integrating the controls into LabVIEW? Are you using custom controls, XControls, or some other method you have written to plug into LabVIEW?
THank you, Shazlan...
Slides for the presentation along with working demo VI will be posted for all on this board to review. We're also working on getting some youtube videos to show what it looks like in action.
Shazlan wrote:
Dear BTC,
Superbly awesome!!!
I'm from Malaysia, at the opposite side of the globe relative to where you guys are at. So I will be really grateful if you can share your slides here.
