August 2011 Meeting

[swatts]

In here I'll put in some notes and materials.

I did a freeform presentation on making custom controls using vector graphics.

The salient points are you can import bitmaps PNGs or WMFs, from a graphics program. Bitmaps are easy, but do not elegantly resizeable and have no transparency. PNGs are as bitmaps but with transparency, this was demonstrated.

Finally it was shown how to import vector graphics from Powerpoint and apply it to a System Boolean. Then several programs were used to demonstrate that all windows WMFs are not the same. The best free editor I've found is a french version of OpenOffice called LibreOffice. OpenOffice and Inkscape were demonstrated as not working.

Rather amusingly it was also shown that the new silver controls (LabVIEW 2011) do not have scaleable graphics, this is most likely due to the fact that the system controls have to change to suit the operating system theme.

Following our in-depth look at OOP James then demonstrated some design patterns (MVC and Command), and how they can be applied to DAQ and test system design. These are the sort of demonstration programs that are making a far more convincing argument for OOP IMO.

Finally Tris took us through some NIWeek highlights.

Hopefully I can post the example and presentation material here.

Thanks to attendees and presenters.