You may have seen this new feature on our Web site already, but we just rolled out the LabVIEW Idea Exchange where you can suggest ideas for us to implement in LabVIEW and, more importantly, you and your fellow LabVIEW users can vote on the ideas that you think are most worthy. We’ve tried suggestion boxes in the past, but this more public approach where we not only get new ideas but also get a better notion of the priority based on the collective wisdom of the crowd has a much better chance of driving impact.
A little background – our LabVIEW R&D managers are also excited about this feature on our Web site as well. With the breadth and complexity of the LabVIEW platform, we struggle at times making tradeoffs about feature development. With tools like Idea Exchange, we aren’t necessarily looking for MORE ideas, but we see it as a much better process to prioritize and improve our hit ratio for new feature development. At certain times in the development cycle, we hope to populate the Idea Exchange with our list of features planned for development in an effort to make some late-in-the-game adjustments as we go. We will also try to comment on the ideas coming from the community periodically to give our position on them.
So bring on your ideas, but be prepared for your cohorts in the LabVIEW user community to weigh in with their own opinions.
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a TED talk by Scott McCloud called Understanding Comics. Scott is an evangelist for comic books as a valid literary form. In his talk, he discusses how the limitations of presenting comics in print as a storyline broken up by snapshots go away as we move to new media. I don’t read comics, so that’s not my point. What’s interesting is to see how his description of the possibilities for comics are very similar to the possibilities of using graphical diagrams to represent programming on an infinite canvas. Even though we are worlds apart, the basic idea of questioning established methods and suggesting a different approach might be better makes us kindred spirits.
The other point I wanted to bring up is that TED is cool – TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It started as a conference in 1984, and has been growing ever since. TED speakers are asked to give their life talk in 18 minutes. TED talks come from a wide range of speakers and are inspirational and thought-provoking. At times, I need to force myself to step away from the daily grind of new versions, feature planning, and your favorite support issue and look at the big picture. Particularly times like now, when the economic meltdown is bombarding us with bad news (in between bouts of flu hysteria). TED talks tend to be good examples of people talking about really big ideas and showing steps they are taking to get there – and many times, these steps are driven by technology involving IO, real-time processing, and advanced software – something we engineer-geeks can appreciate.
We’ve often mused that representing timing in your program is a key concept that has to get more and more intuitive within LabVIEW. As a graphical programming language, LabVIEW is our best shot to figure that out – kind of like how music scores are represented on paper. Following this thought, there is another TED talk from Tod Mackover from the MIT Media Lab discussing how they are trying to extend musical expression to everyone. They are big LabVIEW fans there (we’ve had Media Lab representatives give NIWeek keynotes in the past). I am not sure if they are using LabVIEW in the software they show in this video, but its another example of an inspirational topic that combines art and cool software programs to make the world a better place. You’ll see its core is built around Vision and advanced IO as well.
Take some time out and check out TED. It will make you feel better about where we are going and hopefully take your mind of where we’ve been over the past 6 months.
We are deep in the planning stages of NIWeek. Rather than guess about what you might want to see, hear, and learn about at NIWeek, I thought I’d open up to the community. Personally, I have a number of specific things I would like to communicate at NIWeek – so I’ll ask for feedback on these ideas and then open the discussion to any new ideas as well:
1. Developer Conference – Because LabVIEW is reaching into so many applications now, NIWeek has shifted to be more application focused (RF/Wireless, Sound & Vibration, Robotics, etc). These application summits are great for people in those areas, but we may have taken the focus off of hardcore LabVIEW programming techniques and tactics. I want to get back to the deeply technical “LabVIEW Developer Conference” idea. With that in mind, what would you like to learn more about?
2. Roadmaps – We have big plans for LabVIEW, in a lot of different dimensions. Most of you are not aware of these plans. I think if you were, you would be excited and appreciate where we are going. I would like to share some of these plans with you at NIWeek (assuming I can fend off our legal and communications teams that wourld try to block me). One small example just went live on our website regarding our OS support plans. Let me know what specific questions you have about our future plans.
3. Extending/Plugging into LabVIEW – We are working on ways to open up LabVIEW for partners and customers to more easily integrate with the platform (to connect with other tools, share data, or create addon products). I hope to unveil some of our ideas on this topic at NIWeek.
Please comment with other ideas that you’d like to see more about at NIWeek.
In an effort to be more clear about our support policies and our future plans for OS support, we recently published two documents on ni.com:
OS Support Plans – Our plans for ongoing support on different OSes. Our goal is to review and update this every six months, and provide at least 2 years before we end support for a given OS. “Support” in this case means continuing to add features and testing the development environment on that version of the OS. Applications written in LV will obviously run on these OSes for many years after.
LabVIEW Support Lifecycle Roadmap – This document clarifies how we’ve been operating for many years, describing how long you can expect to get phone support, new hardware support, and maintenance updates for your version of LabVIEW.
I am sure this might bring up more questions for some of you. However, as stated earlier, this does not represent a new policy or strategy on our part – it is simply communicating how we’ve been operating for many years in a more clear, direct way. Feel free to reply if anything is confusing to you.
In our second video interview installment about how we test LabVIEW and our driver software, Byron Radle takes us through our internal Reliability Lab. When you watch it, the background noise is coming from 20 fully-loaded PXI chassis and 40 fully-loaded CompactRIO systems all running at once in our lab – raw (loud) power! You can tell from the freeze frame below that Byron is excited about this lab.
Once again, if you can think of specific scenarios that we need to add to our testing matrix, please respond.
This year, we decided to beef up the LabVIEW beta program with more users and more involvement. For those of you who were not aware, we are now in beta 2 for LabVIEW Orion – you can register for the program here. (Even though we operate using cool project code names like “Saturn” and “Orion”, every year R&D lets the cat out of the bag when the beta goes out. Apparently the feature that has the longest lead time and must be nailed down first is changing the version from the code name to a number. When you sign up for the beta this year, you want to look for “LabVIEW 2009″).
We are also getting more hands on with our beta users. Rather than just have you download the beta version and figure things out on your own, we have recorded some videos showing the new features so you can get a quick overview of what we’ve added. We also have a beta forum where you can ask questions or comment on the new features – each feature area has a dedicated forum thread where they are discussed directly with the developers of that feature.
Even if you are not interested in banging on the new features in the beta, we recommend you download the new version and load up your current application to see if it runs. We’ve been focusing more on making the upgrade process more smooth over the past few years, hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
With our elevated focus on the beta this year, we’ve increased the number of beta users this year by more than 40%.
For years, we have periodically been excited and surprised about our products showing up on TV shows. However, recently it seems to be a happening more often. For your viewing pleasure, go check out LabVIEW on the small screen:
CBS 60 Minutes ran a story last night entitled “Cold Fusion is Hot Again” in which researcher Michael McKubre makes the case for a bright future involving cold fusion. You will notice a bunch of LabVIEW measurement and control applications shown during the interview.
Spike TV has a new show called the Deadliest Warrior in which the pit two famous warriors against each other and try to measure which one is the deadliest. They are using DIAdem extensively to analyze the measurement results to determine the deadliest. It’s a cool show with lots of gory details attempting to simulate real-life impact of these deadly weapons (in one episode, they attempt to slice through 4 huge pigs with one fell swoop of a samarai sword – the pigs simulating humans. I’ll let you watch the episode to see how far they get).l
And finally, one of my kids’ favorites is Discovery Channel’s MythBusters. In an upcoming episode, the MythBusters team uses LabVIEW to control and measure one of the experiments – I’ll have to update this link once the episode goes live.
We have made tremendous strides in the LabVIEW development-testing-releasing cycle over the past 10 years. As we’ve developed more and more products (both hardware and software) that must work with LabVIEW, and we’ve moved to annual releases, we’ve had to continue to turn the screws on these processes.
Byron Radle is one of the key drivers behind our testing process in R&D. He and his team have spearheaded the development of Cross-Product Integration Lab and a Reliability Lab to pound on our products before, and after, they release. I recently interviewed him to give you some insight into these efforts.
Feel free to comment with specific scenarios that you would like us to include in our test matrix, or examples where you found incompatbilities in a release.
Look for Part 2 of my interview with Byron where we take a peak into our product Reliability Lab.
Hopefully, you’ve seen this by now… some of our inside information was leaked today.
We’ve also renewed our focus on 3rd-party partners this year, as I mentioned in my New Year’s Resolutions. I’m glad to see some of them getting into the act as well – here is a new tool from JKI Software that you might be interested in.
We just released a new tool on NI Labs that enables you to access RIO-based hardware applications from C programs. What that means is that you can program your FPGA-based NI hardware using LabVIEW FPGA, but the host application can be written in C. We’ve exposed a C interface for passing data and communicating with the LabVIEW FPGA code on the hardware.
This is significant for two reasons:
We’ve continued to see more of these advanced LabVIEW capabilities get the attention of traditional C programmers. LabVIEW FPGA is one of the most interesting developments in LabVIEW – even the staunchest C programmers tend to acknowledge that graphical programming makes sense for FPGAs.
We have plans for more things coming out on NI Labs this year. Stay tuned.
Posted by pasquarette 
Posted by pasquarette 
Posted by pasquarette 
