The look of string wires.

[altenbach]

Inspired by this idea about boolean wires, I was wondering about why strings aren't pink solid (single-pixel wide for scalars) wires. Would seem clearer to me, especially in order to more easily tell the number of array dimensions.

I think that these "checkerboard patterned" string wires go all the way back to the B&W screens of the original Macintosh and nobody bothered to adapt them to color. 😄

This probably should be another idea unless I get shot down right here. Maybe I should get feedback from colorblind users first... 😮 Please comment.

[johnsold]

Here is your feedback from a colorblind user: Too hard to distinguish from integers, at least in isolation. Side by side or crossing they might be distinguishable.

When LV went color, I resisted changing for one or two revisions (or maybe until it was no longer an option) because some of the color choices were more confusing than the nicely patterened B&W wires.

Lynn

[altenbach]

Yes, these patterns go all the way back to prehistoric B&W LabVIEW. See e.g. page 4-59 of the LabVIEW 1.2 manual.

(It is actually a very impressive document and shows how mature and full-featured LabVIEW already was back in 1989. Good read!)

 

Back then, color was not an option and when color got introduced the special wire patterns remained for boolean and strings. Maybe it is good to have orthogonal visual clues (pattern & color) for major wire types as we do today. The problem is that there are only very limited pattern options given the narrow width. Personally, I probably would prefer solid wires distinguished only by color as suggested above but this might impact usability with certain vision problems. What if we had an option to show/hide enhanced wire patterns?

( EDIT: Thanks Lynn. I only saw your comment after I wrote this post)

[PaulG.]

Stupid question: why didn't NI just color the wires but leave the textures alone?

[crossrulz]

---

@PaulG. wrote:

Stupid question: why didn't NI just color the wires but leave the textures alone?

---

It looks like that is what happened, except for the cluster.  Not sure why that one got changed.

[JÞB]

---

@altenbach wrote:

Yes, these patterns go all the way back to prehistoric B&W LabVIEW. See e.g. page 4-59 of the LabVIEW 1.2 manual.

(It is actually a very impressive document and shows how mature and full-featured LabVIEW already was back in 1989. Good read!)

 

Back then, color was not an option and when color got introduced the special wire patterns remained for boolean and strings. Maybe it is good to have orthogonal visual clues (pattern & color) for major wire types as we do today. The problem is that there are only very limited pattern options given the narrow width. Personally, I probably would prefer solid wires distinguished only by color as suggested above but this might impact usability with certain vision problems. What if we had an option to show/hide enhanced wire patterns?

( EDIT: Thanks Lynn. I only saw your comment after I wrote this post)

---

Wow, all those broken wires!

Spoiler

No I never liked the red x's when they were introduced

[altenbach]

So, what was the look of a broken wire? Did they exist back then?