The Block Diagram should look more like a schematic capture tool. It should have the ability to zoom in and out and pan. Users should be able to draw their own Vis like ICs in a schematic capture program. Parts and wires should be drawn on a grid.
To enable the grid, hit CTRL+SHIFT+3 (You can remember it's CTRL+#, a trick I read from Darren that I still remember since it's so intuitive, or check out LabVIEW Quick Reference Card).
To pan, open up "View > Tools Palette" and select the Scrolling Tool.
Draw your own VI's? You can edit the icon of a subVI to be any shape, as long as it fits into the 32x32px region. To make a smaller, non-rectangular shape, ensure that all pixels outside of your shape are white, which the IDE will recognize as "transparent".
As for zoom, that's a feature that customers/NI have been tug-of-warring over forever. tst has a "controversial" and pretty popular suggestion that was posted on the second day after the Idea Exchange went public.
Could you post a picture of your ideas of what LabVIEW should look like? Posts with illustrations typically get better community support.
I can turn the grid on, but the wires and parts do not snap to the grid. You would have to be familiar with a schematic capture tool to see the diffrence. I think the block diagram would work better if it worked more like a schematic capture tool.
Go to Tools > Options > Alignment Grid and make sure both "Show Block Diagram Grid" and "Enable Diagram Grid Alignment" are checked. Your "parts" should now snap to grid. Wires do not, however. I personally prefer all of my "parts" to snap to a 1px grid.
