Its The Little Things

First off, talking of little things, my girls are now a year old. For those of you who have twins know, this is about when things start to get easier. The fog lifts and you start to get a life back. I am getting close to completing my work on the next version of LabVIEW. That means I should have more time to post here.

Its the little touches that make the Mac OS a pleasure to use. Since I joined the LabVIEW team back in the LabVIEW 7.0 days, I have tried to add a little special Mac something to the release. Unfortunately, due to several circumstances, I will not be able to do that for the next release of LabVIEW.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about sharpening the saw. In other words, stop every once in a while and evaluate your efficiency and take some time to become more efficient. We are doing that with the Mac build of LabVIEW, which means the next release will not have the bells and whistles I would like to have in it.

To lament this, I wanted to publicly remind myself of the cool little Mac features I have been able to get into LabVIEW since 7.0. I hope there are also some things in here that you didn't know, and can now be more productive in LabVIEW. (Warning: These features are currently Mac only. Using LabVIEW on Windows may get frustrating after getting used to these features on a Mac.)

Go To LabVIEW Folder

I was fixing a problem with the file dialog box, when I started to get annoyed with trying to find the LabVIEW folder of the LabVIEW I was currently running (I have several versions of LabVIEW scattered all over my hard drive). So I added a button to the Open File dialog (if it treats LLBs as folders) that will allow you to go directly to the currently running LabVIEW's folder.

Horizontal Scrolling

LabVIEW supported the scroll wheel on the mouse on Windows before it was supported on the Mac. One day I got very annoyed that the scroll wheel did nothing in LabVIEW on the Mac, so I added scroll wheel support. Now that only brought us on parity with Windows, so I went a step further and added horizontal scrolling and fast scrolling. When the Mighty Mouse came out, LabVIEW worked in all directions. However, if you do not have a Mighty Mouse, you can scroll horizontally by holding down the shift key and using the scroll wheel. Fast Scrolling support is enabled (horizontal and vertical) by holding down the option key. It will double the scroll speed.

LabVIEW Version on Dock Icon

Note: This appears not to be compatible with Leopard. I don't know that this will be fixed in time for the next release.

If you set "BadgeAppInDock: True" in your LabVIEW preferences file, the version of LabVIEW will show up on the LabVIEW icon in the dock after you launch (you may have to click on it for it to show up). I never got it working quite right (and apparently it doesn't work for Leopard) so we left it in behind a preference setting. The version number on the icon should survive LabVIEW quit, however, it will be cleared after the Dock is restarted.

Flexible Preference File Format

The "style" of preference files for LabVIEW varies between the platforms. For instance, Windows has a "key=value" format and the Mac has a "key: value" format. I made the Mac preferences file format much more flexible, so line endings don't matter (DOS, Mac Classic or UNIX line endings will work), and equals (=) and colon (:) will work. By default, LabVIEW on Mac will write out the "key: value" format, but can read either format.


Command Line Path Strings

This isn't really a Mac specific feature, its more of a Mac necessitated workaround. I added two VIs at /AdvancedString: Command Line String To Path.vi and Path To Command Line String.vi. These VIs look and behave very similar to String to Path and Path to String primitives, and are drop in replacements for them. In fact, on every other platform, they behave exactly the same as their primitive counterparts. On the Mac, however, they convert between Mac classic paths (colon separated) and UNIX paths (slash separated).

The diagram shown here can convert symlinks into the path they represent (the Get File Info primitive does this a lot better). Notice the pink on the Path/String conversion bullets. They are the AdvancedString versions.

Use these VIs whenever you are interacting with the command line. This will make your VIs more portable among platforms.

I know I am forgetting a few other features, but these are the ones that have remained in my memory after my year of no sleep.