Add the ability to modify the value of an indicator by dragging left or right with the mouse

[Neil.Pate]

In Unity (and also Blender I think, probably others) it is possible to adjust a numeric value by giving focus to the field and then dragging the mouse left or right. It works wonderfully.

Take a look at the video, it is pretty self explanatory. The nice thing is that when your cursor gets to the end of the screen it wraps around automatically (even if you have multiple monitors). It really works very well.

In LabVIEW it is not really possible to nicely scroll through a range of values of a control (at edit time or run time). This is the kind of thing that if you have never used it probably does not seem relevant. However it really does work nicely.

[thols]

So to drag, you first need to select everything in the field, then place the cursor on the left edge of the control and then start dragging? It looks like that in the video, to me. Or is it just that you do that in the video but its active once the control has focus? From the video it doesn't look that self-explanatory.

Do you imagine this as an IDE-thing only or do you have an example where an application uses this? If so, how intuitive is it to interact with?

I understand that in Blender and such things it really helps to place things precisely, and I would have liked it in Sketchup, but I am not convinced yet that its a great improvement for LabVIEW, although it looks cool.

[Neil.Pate]

No @thols, I did not do the video nicely. If you move the cursor over the caption then the cursor changes changes to the I bar cursor and then you can click and drag. You do not need to first give focus to the text field or anything. It really is very easy to do.

It is actually not really super usefuly for precise setting of a control, but very useful when you just want to change a value or iterate over a range of values and don't really care if you are out by a little bit.

I think it is mostly useful during design time, so I would not expect this to be exposed at runtime. Certainly Blender and Unity don't really do this at runtime (because those inspector indicators do not even exist then in that context).

But... now that you make me thing harder about this, the value of the feature comes in being able to see something changing while you are dragging the mouse, so if this is purely a shortcut to change a number then this does not really make much sense.

[wiebe@CARYA]

Here's the video embedded (saves us a downloads):

[Neil.Pate]

Thanks Wiebe!

[prettypwnie]

I love this idea! I wish I had the time on my hands to try to implement this as a QControl. If I do ever have time and NI hasn't implemented it yet, I'll keep it on my backlog of things to do and let you guys know if I try.

[wiebe@CARYA]

AFAIK, graphics designers often use tablet (mouse pens).

So do I, for LabVIEW programming.

(How) Does this control work with mouse pens? For a mouse, it's easy to 'transport' the cursor from left to right, but with a mouse pen the coordinates are 1-1 to the position on the tablet.

When making a QControl, this should be considered...