Feedback on Measurement Studio UI Usability

[JonathanN]

Hello all,

We are currently researching ways of improving the usability of our .NET UI controls and associated APIs.  We would greatly appreciate your feedback so if you have any suggestions, please respond to this forum post.  Listed below are a few questions that might help spark some feedback.

• Is there any specific functionality currently missing from our WinForms UI controls?
• Is there any existing functionality in our WinForms UI controls that you wish was exposed in an easier fashion?
• How many of yall use the smart tags associated with our controls in VS 2005?
  
• If you do use this feature, do you prefer that over right-clicking the graph and selecting a menu item (i.e. Edit Plots, Edit XAxes, etc)? I have attached a snapshot of the smart tag on our Waveform Graph if you are not familiar with smart tags.
• Do you spend a great deal of timing customizing the appearance of our UI controls?
• If so, what types of customizations do you make (i.e. changing the plot color, backgrounds colors, 3d styles, etc)?
• For those of yall that are creating DAQ applications, do you find it difficult to take your acquired data and plot that to a graph?
  
• Once you plot the data, are there any additional UI customizations you always have to make in order to get the graph "just the way you like it"?
• Are most of yall trying to plot data to a graph in real-time or do most of you gather the data first and then plot it to a graph?
  
• For those of you doing real-time plotting, what are you particulary interested in? what are you particulary interested in when you are viewing the graph?

Thanks for helping us improve Measurement Studio.

Best Regards,

[elite_code_monkey]

Jonathan, Greetings.

In my opinion, "Usability" [in general] is good (i.e., it can easily be used - even by the most novice .NET developer, in my opinion).

By the way, I use version 8.1.20.472.

...

On the other hand, I believe that the online-help lacks example-code-snippets (fortunately, the examples are good and [to some extent] self-explanatory).

Anyhow, I currently only use the ScatterPlot control (rather extensively to plot real-time data).

1. The main shortcoming is high CPU-usage after history-count reaches history-capacity.

To alleviate this, I've had to delete some of the oldest data-points in order to regain CPU resources.  This fix works well; however, I believe that it has induced a small memory-leak (in spite of this, our application runs very well).

Along the same note, it would be very useful if the function ClipDataPoints overloaded another signature to delete points starting at some arbitrary index and ending after some arbitrary length.

...

2. Another shortcoming is that Range.Maximum/Range.Minimum are read-only properties.  In order to set these values, the constructor must be used (thereby, having to create a new Range object).

...

We've considered porting some of our application, from LabVIEW, to a web-based .NET/Measurement-Studio web-service/application.

In order to do this, it will be necessary to have "pipe" and "pump" shaped-controls (similar to those released by DSC).  Are there any plans to provide a similar set of controls for Measurement Studio?



Thanks, C

[tdoupe]

First of all- thanks for asking.

I do alot of WinXP interfaces with your stuff. Usually slow speed (<1 hz.) [ Ovens, environmental chambers, and the like]. The GUI components all work as advertised -- love the arrays of anything. I always have multiple signal paths and/or instruments.

Histograms are fast. Don't really convey anything-- but my customers love them:)

With several responses from this forum, I have gotten everything running --

BUT - since you asked....

More multi-threaded examples would have helped.  Almost all equipment I getted dumped with, fires off some data at a different cycle. Running asynchronous threads seemed like a good idea. Updating the Main GUI(with gorgeous NI graphics)  with my asynchronous C# data object(which might  or might not also be involved with NI-VISA)  is still a longggg, strange, trip.

Not sure how you would shield me from that obnoxious part of Windows - but that would be an excellent part of any component. As in :

MainForm.Label1.Text =clsObject.Method.NIReadMe( "myNewDataFromNID345");

Tom

[Colin hughes]

Hi Jonathan

The up-down numeric control need some way to control the buffer update rate.

If used for incrementing with hardware (CAN messages in my case) the buffer can run our of control because of the slownes of what we are controlling.

When this is a test bench or Engine, damage could be the result with a lot of ~?:@~.

Ta

Colin 

[JonathanN]

Hi Colin,

I am a little confused by your statement "The up-down numeric control need some way to control the buffer update rate." The up-down numeric control doesn't have a buffer so I'm not clear on what you are saying. Maybe in your case, the up-down numeric is controlling some CAN driver buffer? If you could clarify some of your statements, that would be helpful.

Thanks

[Ilkka]

Hello Jonathan,

Thank for your questions for making Measurement Studio even better.

Is there any specific functionality currently missing from our WinForms UI controls?

• Yes, easy finger driven UI controls for touch screens.
• It would be nice if some of your controls would have integer types. (Especially NumericEdit)
  

Is there any existing functionality in our WinForms UI controls that you wish was exposed in an easier fashion?

I do not know..

 

How many of yall use the smart tags associated with our controls in VS 2005?

I just noticed that first time...

Do you spend a great deal of timing customizing the appearance of our UI controls?
If so, what types of customizations do you make (i.e. changing the plot color, backgrounds colors, 3d styles, etc)?

Yes, a little for changing colors, backgrounds, etc for fitting NI’s controls to our UI style and sometimes for adding more functionality. A nice example is a possibility to draw notes by a hand into graphs with a help of touch screen.

For those of yall that are creating DAQ applications, do you find it difficult to take your acquired data and plot that to a graph?

No... it is easy.

Once you plot the data, are there any additional UI customizations you always have to make in order to get the graph "just the way you like it"?

If you can make some smoothing for the graphs. Please see the attached picture where is NI’s ScatterPlot compared to our own plot.

Memory optimizations for the graphs; at the moment panning is working little slowly if there is a lot of data. Please see the attached videos (The first is NI’s ScatterGraph and the second our own old software).  In our new product I have changed to NI Scatter Graph; it has still so much more benefits so that there is no idea of playing with own graphics.


Are most of yall trying to plot data to a graph in real-time or do most of you gather the data first and then plot it to a graph?

Both and sometimes we compare old collected data to online measurements in a same graph.

For those of you doing real-time plotting, what are you particulary interested in? what are you particulary interested in when you are viewing the graph?

We want easy finger driven zooming etc.. (please compare to Apple’s iPhone)

Have a nice day,

Ilkka

[Ilkka]

Hello again,

The attachments are not in a right order in the previous post. But you can easily find the right ones...

BR,
Ilkka

 

[Abhishek Ghuwalewala]

Ilkka,

Regarding your concern about smoothing the plot's line, this feature is available in Measurement Studio UI controls. On the plot object, set the AntiAliased property to true to achieve a smooth plot line.

[Ilkka]

Thanks Abhishek,

it is better now!

Have a nice day,

Ilkka

[Colin hughes]

Hi Jonathan

You could be right as CAN does have a read/wright buffers hence the need to control the update rate of the up-down numeric control.

Regards

Colin