Fellow wireworkers,

I really wanted to polish these up a bit more, but I also wanted to get them out a bit before NI Week. I won't be doing near as much LabVIEW development (hardly any ) for the next few years, so I figured I would put these out to the community and see if there is any worth in them.

First off, a disclaimer -- the images are from the Nuvola theme and if you use them in your work you should look at the licensing (BSD, I believe). I am also including modified versions of the Tunnel Wiring Wizard (TWW) and Michael's routine for coloring block diagram structures. Thanks to them for their original work. There may be more that I am forgetting...

Second, installation -- You should be able to copy the project and resource directories from the ZIP file directly over to a LabVIEW 8.2+ directory. The contents inside those folders will show up where they need to go. NOTE that this will replace the lv_icon file if you are already overriding the built-in icon editor. ALSO NOTE that if you don't have OpenG installed then you will need to open the code and link the OpenG files to the OpenG Support directory included as a separate ZIP. If you have OpenG installed then simply continue on with your awesomeness.

DESCRIPTION:
Included is an alternate Icon Editor and a Development Environment Toolbar. The purpose of the Icon should be fairly obvious, and the purpose of the Toolbar is to allow a nice way to group tools like the TWW for easy access as well as keyboard shortcuts. These are accessed from the menu bar Tools>>JDev Tools.

There is a help screen for the Icon Editor, but briefly its design is to parse the VI filename and auto-create a VI based on that. It allows for various themes to be created, and incorporates images easily into your VIs. There is an interface doing this en masse to a directory, as well as an individual interface if you modify a single VI's icon. I use tags to store the icon description, which allows for later modification. I could write a whole lot more, but go take a look...

The Toolbar has a couple other tools included that I wrote, to place captions on structures, and a couple dealing with the connector pane. The idea was to make it easy to write new tools and have them automatically show up in the toolbar. Right-clicking would bring up a 'parameters' view if applicable. Shift/Ctrl/Alt clicking would modify the behavior of the tool if applicable. Not a lot of documentation or help on this one, but it is fairly self-explanatory.

 JDev.zip ( 7.62MB ) Number of downloads: 109

 JDev_OpenG_Support.zip ( 5.64MB ) Number of downloads: 79


Let me know what you think. I know there isn't much time before NI Week, but I will be there and definitely at the BBQ.

David
(JDave)

Hi David,

Just though I'd give a little feedback, as I have just had a short play with this

On the plus side, I love the concept the tools in a floating palette , it is neither original nor new, but how come NI have never provided something like this already is one on the many things that baffles me about LabVIEW.

It is a really useful way of working (well for me anyway), something like this but configurable I would really really go for and I fully intend to have a look at how you have done this and try and customise it for what I want .

On the down side, I much prefer Mark Ball's icon editor, with the one provided in this package I have managed to lock up LabVIEW a couple of times, also have managed to get a number of issues and crashes using the various tools, I think because there are no checks on things like "is a valid VI selected" before you call the tools.

I think a better was to do the openG libs would be just to list the packages required and the min version required rather than supplying them how you have.

But as I said for the basic floating toolbar and its potential

cheers

Dannyt

Thanks for playing !

Glad you like the toolbar. It is a little customizable using the setup icon on the right, but what customization were you thinking of?

I started the icon editor because I don't like NI's.

Well, was going to write a bit more, but my ride to the airport for NI Week is here !!!

David