HELP -> ABOUT -> Dialog box

[earlevel]

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@Jim_M wrote:
         Perhaps the best way to help you at this point would be for you to post your code.  Once we have this, we can test it in 8.5 and see if we can replicate your issue.

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I just loaded 8.5. It still has exhibits the problem. I tried a bunch of variations under 8.2 that I haven't tried on 8.5, but here's my about box (simplified). Build a standalone (one built for PowerPC processor is included), choose About (in my real app, I wrote an external that sets the menu item to my app's name):

(BTW, in OS X, Apple dropped the convention of using an ellipse, so LabVIEW's About menu item should be "About LabVIEW", not "About LabVIEW...".)

[Sorooshster]

earlevel said:

"I've tried running this window from another vi (not via the About menu), and it works perfectly. So, I tried to make an About.vi that would not open at all, but would call my About dialog vi, but this didn't work either--LabVIEW seems to always open the About.vi window, no matter what I try."

What exactly did you do when you were able to get it to run perfectly?  You said calling it from another VI didn't work and for me it blinks if I just run the VI even without building it into an exe.  I haven't been able to try it on a OS X machine yet but I'm getting the same behaviour with LV 8.5.1 in Windows XP.  Can you give me some further detail on what you did when it worked?  Thanks.

[earlevel]

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@S_Soroosh wrote:

What exactly did you do when you were able to get it to run perfectly?  You said calling it from another VI didn't work and for me it blinks if I just run the VI even without building it into an exe.  I haven't been able to try it on a OS X machine yet but I'm getting the same behaviour with LV 8.5.1 in Windows XP.  Can you give me some further detail on what you did when it worked?  Thanks.

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I didn't explain that very well, Stephen--I'll give it another try.

First, what I'm after: I want my About dialog to open centered on the user's screen, so I set it to open centered in the VI Properties. When I choose "About..." in the applications menu, my About.vi window opens in its last saved location, then jumps to the centered position. To avoid this, I set the properties to "Window runs transparently" (100%), as well as disabling the "Show panel..." options, and coded the vi such that it would open its panel and set transparency to 0 programmatically; when the dialog closes, it resets transparency to 100%.

I'll enumerate the three points I made previously, in an attempt to be more clear:

1. If I build a standalone, so that the LabVIEW runtime opens the window in response to the "About..." menu choice, the vi window opens briefly in the last-saved location, disappears, and re-appears in the centered location.

2. The window functions as expected if I open it programmatically (from another vi, as opposed to the About menu mechanism). It appears centered on the screen.

3. Since #2 worked, I tried to see if I could make an About.vi that never appeared, but programmatically opened another vi that was the dialog window. This failed because the LabVIEW runtime, apparently, always opens the About.vi window. So, while the dialog window would open centered, this new About.vi window (not meant to be seen) would be visible as well.

It *seems* that the LabVIEW runtime always opens the window of the vi named About.vi. This would not be a bad thing except that it apparently does it before centering the window as the properties request.

[Sorooshster]

Earlevel,

I can reproduce everything you have described and I've tried a number of different things to get around it and have not had any luck.  I will bring this to some of our senior LabVIEW  support engineers to see if we can come up with anything, it may in fact be a bug.  If that is the case then I will notify R&D.  In the mean time, it looks like the flicker of the about.vi always comes from the location that it was the last time the vi was save before being built into the exe.  For now, you can center the about.vi and save it before building the exe. and the problem will at least be less noticable.  Thanks!

[earlevel]

Thank you Stephen. (Centering will only help if the user has the same sized screen as mine, so I stuck in in the lower right, as much offscreen as LabVIEW allows, and it's not so noticeable that way.)