Birth of a Feature: The improbable story of VI Snippet

The next version of LabVIEW will be coming to a presentation near you very soon.  I thought I would share the back story about one of the new features that you will see called the VI Snippet. 

First, the problem statement.  For many years, we’ve been working on better ways to empower users to share their code with other users – through better Web features on ni.com and better ways of packaging and distributing your VIs.  The popularity of the platform, and the expertise of our user base, can be measured in some ways by the number of VIs available on the Web – it’s a kind of currency for LabVIEW. 

We have a few challenges in enabling users to share code:

1. LabVIEW is graphical, so you really need to see the block diagram to understand what techniques you want to learn more about
2. Seeing the diagram ins’t enough – it needs to be easy to get the VI from a Web site into your LV environment so you can experiment with the code.  One advantage text-based languages has is you can simply cut and paste text from any document into your environment to transfer it.  LabVIEW code needs to move that easily. 

With these seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the way, enter the Hogg – that would be Simon Hogg, one of our talented young LabVIEW product managers.   Simon had some ideas on how we can create a better experience for users to share code, but rather than try to convince R&D to build something, he went off and built it prototyped it himself (the beauty of LabVIEW for fast prototyping).   The idea is simple, but when implemented comes across as magical.  In LabVIEW 2009, you create a special screen shot of your VI – called a VI Snippet – which embeds the actual binary information of the VI into the image.  You can then post that image anywhere on a Web page and other users simply drag the image onto a blank block diagram in LabVIEW and voilá! – the actual LabVIEW code is there, ready to explore, edit, or run.   Check out the video below to see it in action:

Once Simon created his prototype, it was quickly dubbed internally as “the Hogg Feature” or “the Hogg” for short.  We’ve even taken it to its verb form – similar to “googling” or “xeroxing” something, when you distribute a VI Snippet, you are “hogging it.” 

Naturally, there was the small step of actually designing, implementing, and testing the feature in R&D to make it work in the product for real – but having a working prototype was a great influencer.  If one of our product managers can prototype the feature, then certainly our R&D guys can develop it. 

So I wanted to share this story to show that even the best-laid plans at NI to smoothly manage the feature set of upcoming LabVIEW versions can be disrupted here when someone combines initiative with the power of LabVIEW programming to make something happen (and because the Hogg is a cool feature).  I look forward to “hogging” some VIs posted by the c0mmunity of LabVIEW users in the near future.