LabVIEW
Darren's Weekly Nugget 07/27/2009
It's a rare occasion that I come across a LabVIEW feature I've never seen before. Today was one of those occasions. It turns out there is a menu full of juicy options when you right-click on the scrollbar of a VI's front panel:
Most of these options have to do with the Pane adjacent to the scrollbar...of course, on a front panel with no splitter bars, there is only one Pane. So if you are dealing with a front panel with multiple panes, the Visible Items > Label menu option is handy for renaming the pane. The Create > Reference menu option is also handy for quickly creating a control reference that you can use for programmatically manipulating the pane. But the coolest out of all of them is probably the Properties menu option, that gives you the property page for the pane:
How come nobody ever told me there was this easy way of assigning a background image to the panel? There are a few stock images that come with LabVIEW (shown in the dialog above, and available on disk in the [LabVIEW]\resource\backgrounds folder), but as you can see, you can also choose your own image, and there are options for tiling the image, stretching it, or centering it.
Darren wrote:How come nobody ever told me there was this easy way of assigning a background image to the panel?
If you want to finish an Uber-Nugget I started called "E UNUM PLURABUS - Out of One Many" that shows how to combine a sub-panel a Pictue Control and dynamic event registration to allow you to "un-dock" regions of your GUI. E-mail and you can finish it up. 
Ben
