LabVIEW 2011 Silver Palette

[Majicz]

LabVIEW 2011 has got some cool controls, charts and Indicators in the silver palette - What do you think?

[Qia.sky]

We need stable LabVIEW

[minnellac]

At first glance (which is all I've really had of them), they look nice, but I try to use all System controls for my serious GUIs, so I don't know if I will ever use these. I would have much preferred to see effort spent on improving the functionality of the controls instead of just polishing their looks.

Chris

[Matthew_Kelton]

As Chris said, they look nice.  The "Modern" control set has needed an update for quite sometime.  But, NI's stance has been to use system controls, so why is time being spent on creating new controls rather than working on versions of non-system controls which will look like system controls AND properly update if the Windows theme is changed?  All we have now is quasi-system controls (for things like plots or timestamps, etc.) which look good in one theme, but break in another.  NI still doesn't give us access to the Windows (or Mac) theme, so we're at their mercy to gove us proper system controls.

[DarkLordOfG]

It would be nice if you could remove the text AND center the decal.  The decal is always left justified.  There is no need for both in most cases (text and decal).  The decal tells the function and the buttons should be able to be made smaller.

[francois-normandin]

Hi Rammer,

you can always right-click on the button and choose "Customize..." under the Advanced menu.

Then you can click the "Change to Customize Mode" button to enable you to edit these.

If you plan on re-using the modified version often, save them to your user.lib directory.

[hercules0]

The Silver Controls look slick, but I have not used them yet. I'm curious if the anti-aliasing and gradients have a performance hit when the Front Panel is Open? Closed? Minimized?

[tst]

At least according to this, the answer is yes when it's open:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Plots-should-have-anti-alias-off-by-default-for-huge-c...

I assume that you don't get the hit when it's closed or minimized.

[LabBEAN]

2-D Array of Round Color Box (Silver) brought my application to its knees.  Swtiched back to standard round color box and all is well.  I did some experiments and while much slower to update surrounding indicators on the UI, there were no "significant" problems.  I'm not yet sure why it was so bad in my particular case.  In my actual app I'm using queues and notifiers (not just queues like in my test case), which is one difference.  500 Hz loop rates required, so in the actual app I'm hitting the wait-for-notifier-with-0ms-timeout code pretty often.  May echo back with more info.

Edit:  I'm not trying to update the UI at 500 Hz, there's a producer loop feeding a consumer loop at that rate.  The consumer also updates indicators at 10 Hz.  The producer has the aforementioned notifier code.

[vitoi]

I haven't used the silver controls, but when I took a look at the basic controls I noticed that they have a thicker border. Therefore although the bit containing the number, etc is the same size, the overall control is larger, thereby taking up more front panel real estate.