Love this stuff:

http://forums.lavag.org/GUI-user10874-album79.html

Note: When viewing the main image page, click on the image to get a larger size in a thickbox.

Cool idea, having a GUI gallery. It's often difficult to figure out good designs so inspiration - or stealing some good ideas - is great:-)

LabVIEW GUIs have a tendency to look...well - like LabVIEW GUIs, non-standard colors, 3D buttons etc.

The examples so far avoid most of that, but there is a big no no in the upper left corner of the windows - a window name that ends with .vi. Aligning and making all of the controls in a group the same size would be another tip, makes it look a bit cleaner. It's always easier to criticize than to make things yourself though:-)

Is there a way to make all the GUI galleries accessible from one place? Right now it looks like each one is just a personal gallery of the user who created it. That means, for instance, that Israel Carrión's gallery and Carlos Calderon's gallery are totally separate, and if you're looking at one of them there's no indication the other one even exists. (Case in point: those are the only two I know about. Are there others?)

We could create a LabVIEW GUI category and them all placed there.

If you're looking for feedback, I think it's a great idea.

And an Icon that is the default LabVIEW Icon. If you are going to go to the trouble of doing all that custom graphics, then make a nice App icon (in all the various sizes and color depths) as well.

That said, those are some nice FPs.

Personally, my general rule for GUI design is, if another LabVIEW dev can tell it was written in LabVIEW, I have failed. For that reason, I study the style guildlines of the target OS before building my GUIs.

Maybe it's just me, or my limited customer base; But I've never really had a problem with LabVIEW applications looking like LabVIEW applications. Since our customers are usually the ones specifying LabVIEW, I wouldn't think they have a problem with that either. (Especially considering what UIs used to look like with Visual Designer)

That said, I do really like some of the examples in the gallery. Looks like a number of them might be borrowing graphics and backgrounds from Linux distros.

Making "pretty" UIs are all very well, but the absolute number one most important thing is: does it meet the system requirements? If a requirement is that it look "cool" (which it never would be, as "looking cool" isn't easily measureable, so how can it be a true system requirement? ) then so be it. I absolutely admit that the UIs in the gallaries are visually appealing, but the real question is: "why are they appealing"? Is it because they're intuative? Colorful? Well laid-out?

I've written a couple of articles on appropriate UI design. I feel that sometimes we get caught up in over engineering things without true and honest thought for both the system requirements and the end user. Wouldn't you prefer an app with an intuative UI that works, or an app with a pretty UI that doesn't?

Article 1: User Interface Design - More than just a pretty face…
Article 2: User Interface Design - Elemental Layout

Well if I have to choose, I want a working app with a pretty intuitive UI.

PJM

Me Niether, In most cases my work is for one-off or a few-off systems, for use by engineers who know the app. is written in LabVIEW, who might even know how to code LabVIEW themselves... No harm, that I can see, if it looks like LabVIEW, so long as it responds in relatively predictable and graceful ways to the user's attempt to control it.

Best, Louis

Right - my customers want to test their products. I've never had a requirement of "does not look like it was written in LabVIEW"

It's not LabVIEW (and this is a bit of a threadjack), but just for giggles here's a screenshot of one of the most appaling UIs I've ever seen:


That's the actual application window. It's an application I tried to use briefly a few years ago, when I was looking for a tool to change the icons on some EXE files. Some of those colored areas are (clusters of) buttons, some are drag & drop receivers, etc. It made my eyes bleed.

I wish I had a better-quality screenshot, but that's the best I found on the net, and I'll be dambed if I'm going to subject myself to that again just for a LAVA post .