Mixed Checkbox

Another new feature of LabVIEW 8.5 is the System Mixed Checkbox.

You often use checkboxes to set an attribute of an item. But sometimes you can select multiple items and set their attributes together.

The mixed checkbox is useful when you need a checkbox with a third state: "some of the selected items are checked and some are unchecked."

Check out this short video for a demo.

Project File Management Enhancements

Continuing my series of posts about the new features of LabVIEW 8.5, here is a short video about the file management enhancements to the LabVIEW Project.

For those of you who aren't familiar with LabVIEW projects, they are a type of file introduced in LabVIEW 8.0. The project file (*.lvproj) does not contain VIs (the way LLBs do), but rather refers to VI files (*.vi) that exist separately on disk.

For Loop with Conditional Terminal

Starting a series of posts about the new features of LabVIEW 8.5, here is a video about Conditional Terminals in For Loops.

New Icon Library

The next time you want to create a VI icon and would prefer not to draw the whole thing a pixel at a time, you might want to check out the recently-announced National Instruments Icon Library.

"This resource offers you a selection of premade icons that you can download and use for free in your own VIs, toolbars, and applications".

And there's a button that links to it in the LabVIEW 8.5 icon editor!
[Before anyone asks... there's no teddy bear icon in the library, sorry. ]

Tip: Use Edit>>Import Picture to Clipboard to easily paste image files into LabVIEW panels and icons. This will preserve the transparency in GIF and PNG files.

LabVIEW 8.5

LabVIEW 8.5 is here, just in time for NI Week 2007!

I am looking forward to posting about the our new features. If there are any specific features that interest you, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail and I'll try to cover those first.

Also, now that LabVIEW 8.5 has been released, I can give you more details about my NI Week session on Wednesday. Most of the "Understanding and Avoiding LabVIEW Cross-linking Problems" session will be demonstrations of new features in LabVIEW 8.5 focused on predicting, detecting, and repairing cross-linking problems, including:

• the new Files View which shows your project contents in disk organization
• tools for displaying and resolving multiple VIs of the same name referenced by a single project
• new Find tools for the project, which help you find items by name and by caller/callee relationship
• auto-populating folders, which automatically update in response to content changes on disk.

Customizing Your "New" Dialog

The LabVIEW File>>New dialog lets you create new VIs, controls, libraries, projects, etc. It also has a section that lets you create new VIs from templates. Did you know you can customize the templates in this dialog?

In your LabVIEW folder on disk (wherever your LabVIEW.exe is located), you have a templates folder. The contents of this folder are reflected in the New File dialog. You can delete or modify the templates that ship with LabVIEW. You can add your own VIs, templates, and folders.

Templates are a great way to save time if you find yourself performing the same edits every time you create a new, blank VI. Do you always set a certain connector pane? Always drop an error input control and error output indicator? Next time, save a copy into your templates folder, and you can start from that VI instead of blank VI in the future, and save yourself some time.