Big Ideas Matter – Graphical Programming and TED

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.

What do you want to see at NIWeek?

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.

New OS Roadmap Now Live

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.