Culverson - Elegant software that is a pleasure to use

LabVIEW

Style Guide
This LabVIEW Style Guide is intended as a statement of values that define Culverson's approach to the software our customers get.

Appearance

   The polished appearance of an app is vital to the customer's perception of the product. Part of the reason Culverson's software is well received is this appearance, even though the client cannot specifically tell you that. To meet these standards, you must:
  1. Test your panels on both small fonts and large fonts. See Object Labels.
  2. Have buttons that are uniform in size and color, and aligned. See Buttons.
  3. Be as cross-platform as possible, particularly when using File Paths.
  4. Yield time. Typically a panel is used to offer choices via buttons. Before event structures (LV 6.1), the usual way was to have a while loop containing a sequence. Each frame of the sequence would read a button, and perform an action IF the button was true. The majority of the time, of course, the buttons would all be false, and so there was nothing to do except repeat the loop.
    The fact that the computer can repeat this loop 100 million or more times per second is not a good reason to do so. Unless the program is attempting to measure human reaction time, no one will notice if the button is polled every 100-200 mSec. Use a WAIT operation somewhere in the loop to slow down. The computer can then use this time for other processes, background operations, simultaneous WHILE loops, whatever.
    In the CULVERSON PROGRAM TOOLS library, there is a VI called QUIT BUTTON, which performs this delay, along with conducting a dialog upon quit(" Are you sure you want to quit?"). If it's appropriate, use it.
  5. When terminating a program use the EXIT function to quit completely. Do not leave the window around for the user to close. The ROOT FOLDER vi in the CULVERSON PROGRAM TOOLS library provides a boolean output called NOT IN LIBRARY. Wire this output to the EXIT function and you will quit the Run-Time Library if you are running the executable application, but not if you are in the development system.