LabVIEW
Can the interface be impacted by the locality and languages of windows and how do you test it?
Hi,
I work for a small company who's is not about software development. We deliver complex product which we have to test in-house and for that I have developed our own application.
Once in a while we are kindly asked to deliver this application (in a simpler form) to the customer so they can start playing with our product the time they develop their own software.
My problem is that our customer, based in S.Korea, is having UI issues that never occured before. Some button got resized and moved, sometimes overlapping.Some "basic" characters re-written.
I attach below a simple demonstration of what I mean. But my two main questions are:
- Appart from screen resolution (I do not think it's the problem here, see below why), what can impact such UI changes?
- As a side note, of course we tested it locally (Germany) and none of these issues showed up.
- More interestingly to me: how do you test your software when you deliver it to a customer in a different country? Assumed it's always on Windows.
- Do you have a VM on which you can change the locality (and performances?)
- Do you have multiple machines/reprogram some PCs to adapt them to the country everytime you have to deliver to a specific country?
Thanks for your help.
Vinny
Here's a part of how it's supposed to look like:
How it is looking: The "Control" list of buttons is a Radio button. I have resized it so that "Open Loop" was not accessible. For some reason it reappeared. Also, "Torque Control" button got a little bit bigger, do not know why.
Some simple characthers (Here °C) got changed to korean language I guess? (do not mind the red colour)
Hi Vinny,
@VinnyAstro wrote:
My problem is that our customer, based in S.Korea, is having UI issues that never occured before. Some button got resized and moved, sometimes overlapping.Some "basic" characters re-written.
I attach below a simple demonstration of what I mean. But my two main questions are:
- Appart from screen resolution (I do not think it's the problem here, see below why), what can impact such UI changes?
Some simple characthers (Here °C) got changed to korean language I guess? (do not mind the red colour)
- Beside the screen resolution there is also the display scaling setting in Windows (or Linux) that can be different. In Germany this setting is called "Skalierung", found in "Anzeigeeinstellungen" (Win11)…
- There can be a different default font in use on the foreign computer, that will interfere with your UI design. You can define certain fonts in the INI file of your executable (instead of using "default" fonts)!
- "°" is not a "simple" char! It does not belong to the standard ASCII char (from 0x00 to 0x7F), but sits in the language-dependent part of the char encoding (0xB0 for my German Windows). For Corean computers there definitely a different encoding is needed…
(Unfortunately the Unicode support in LabVIEW is hard to use…)
Hi Gerd,
Thanks for your details!
- I didn't think of the display scaling ... How do you manage that? For display resolution I would complexify a bit my UI and work with seperators and button scaled to specific areas, or even program some stuff. But are those affected by the scaling of the display? Clearly, their setup just made some text bigger which reminds me that you can also scale only the text...
How do you effectively deal with that ? - I didn't know about the font in the INI file, thanks for the tip. Can you point me to the documentation of it so that I can prepare it properly please?
- Fair enough, I thought it was part of the standard ASCII but must admit I didn't check.
If you also have some tips on how you test an application on a target machine, I would appreciate it, I don't really have any idea of how that works...
Best,
Vinny
Hi Vinny,
@VinnyAstro wrote:
- I didn't know about the font in the INI file, thanks for the tip. Can you point me to the documentation of it so that I can prepare it properly please?
@VinnyAstro wrote:
- I didn't think of the display scaling ... How do you manage that? For display resolution I would complexify a bit my UI and work with seperators and button scaled to specific areas, or even program some stuff. But are those affected by the scaling of the display? Clearly, their setup just made some text bigger which reminds me that you can also scale only the text...
How do you effectively deal with that ?
Ask your customer about its preferred monitor settings (resolution, scaling, fonts) and design your app for those settings…
(Effectively you don't have control over the user settings on customer computer systems.)
Hi Vinny,
@VinnyAstro wrote:
But it did show up on their screens, do you think it would be the same scaling problem that caused this?
Maybe…
Why don't you hide that button (or Disable&GrayOut) programmatically so the customer can't use it?
Forgot to mention in my last message:
After requesting the customer parameters and designing the UI according to them you should also document those settings in the software documentation as "recommended and tested settings"…
