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Re: LabVIEW UI Tips and Tricks - PartI

SimonH
NI Employee (retired)

I had the chance to make a presentation for NIWeek and our Developer Education Days sessions this year and I decided to focus on highlighting some little known LabVIEW features and techniques that enable you to create very usable and attractive user interfaces.

Just in case you weren't able to make it out to the event in your area, here is all the juicy content:

Slides/Notes

Windows Application Example

Touch Panel Example

Informative Kiosk Example

In addition to the source code above I recorded videos of all the "how-to" demos, enjoy:

Add Decals to Buttons:

Using Tooltips:

Hide the LabVIEW Toolbar:

Customize the Run-Time Menu:

Recoloring Graphs:

Use the busy cursor:

Using panes:

Spawn dialogs:

Panel backgrounds:

Create decorations in PowerPoint:

Transparent indicators:

Transparent PNGs in a picture ring:

Comments
Thoric
Trusted Enthusiast

Simon,


These are all fantastic videos, I'm sure the community will learn a huge amount from these.

I especially like the use of Powerpoint to create png images with a preserved transparency layer, so simple and incredibly effective.

Many kudos to you!

Thoric (CLA, CLED, CTD and LabVIEW Champion)


eek
NI Employee (retired)

Agreed. Great video tutorials, Simon. Thanks for sharing.


TCPlomp
Trusted Enthusiast

Nice videos!

I always wondered what decal was, thanks.


However you can make a modern string indicator transparent. Here's a short how to to create such an indicator.

Ton

Free Code Capture Tool! Version 2.1.3 with comments, web-upload, back-save and snippets!
Nederlandse LabVIEW user groep www.lvug.nl
My LabVIEW Ideas

LabVIEW, programming like it should be!
CyGa
Active Participant

Very nice job ! All these useful tips on the same web page, thanks !

Here is a nice website to find textures for your panel backgrounds : http://www.cgtextures.com/.

CLA, CTA, LV Champion
View Cyril Gambini's profile on LinkedIn
This post is made under CC BY 4.0 DEED licensing
rex1030
Active Participant

Sweet Videos. Thanks so much!

Hmm... where's the kudos button?

---------------------------------
[will work for kudos]
cirrusio
Active Participant

Very nice Simon.  It's amazing how even some of the most advanced users are not aware of these features (I'm not very advanced, so every bit helps me ).

JetYo
Member

I need these videos, but i can't see them right on this page or find them in other ways either, Could anybody sent them to me or contact me with msn(JetYo@hotmail.com). Looking forward for your replys.

JetYo
Member

can anybody send "Using Panes" vedio to me. My email:JetYo@hotmail.com

WeiCheng
Member

Thanks SimonH for such great work,but I couldn't see the vedio link,can anyone help me? my email:mikle.wang@163.com

Boone301
Member

Perfect!

GRamy
Member

Simple, yet powerful document for all Labview UI Developers........

bhargav.iisc
Member

Simon,

Thanks a lot!

It saved a lot of time of mine, and very helpful for me.

Regards,

Bhargav G

enderwiggin
Member

Thanks for the downloadable presentation and examples.

Wish I could watch the videos, sounds like they would be very helpful, but work seems to think that blocking youtube will make people more productive than to allow it to be a helpful resource and just encourage responsible use.

tgraef
Member

Excellent! The UI is one of the most important aspects of a truly user-friendly and usable app, yet really useful & readily usable techniques are all too hard to come by. 

Thanks!

MoReese
Active Participant

Thanks for the videos Simon.  There are a lot of simple powerful tools there to dress up my UI.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reese, (former CLAD, future CLD)

Some people call me the Space Cowboy!
Some call me the gangster of love.
Some people call me MoReese!
...I'm right here baby, right here, right here, right here at home
boochbrain
Member

Thank you Simon. These videos are awesome. I have an application where I want to show measurements going in and out of spec. In the "recoloring graphs" video you said you were using the "limit VI" and so you had the ability to show upper and lower limits. Where can I find this limit VI?

SimonH
NI Employee (retired)

It's the "Mask and Limit Testing" Express VI (Express»Signal Analysis).  You'll need at least LabVIEW Full (LabVIEW Base doesn't have it).

You can also manually supply additional plots that represent your limits. Generate waveforms or datapoints to reflect your upper and lower limits and build them into an array which you wire to the graph to show multiple plots.

Jolyon
Member

A set of simple and very effective techniques to give good user interfaces!  I'm really looking looking forwards making my LabView interfaces look like they're not LabView!

This is the droid you're looking for...
JWalshe
Member

Great Job. Massive help. Thanks

SwapsG
Member

Thanks a lot Simon for the Videos.

vikramps65
Member

Excellent work! Learned a lot of the useful stuff in the last one hour when compared to the whole of last week.

Baltibu
Member

Hello Simon,

Thanks for your Post!

can you please repost the Videos ?

Thanks

Baltibu