VIPM 2010 has entered beta testing…

and we need your help!

VIPM 2010 has lots of cool improvements like major performance boosts, better configuration management tools, and support for 64-bit LabVIEW.  But more importantly, it sports a completely redesigned Package Builder that lets you package any type of LabVIEW Add-on you can think of.

Can you prove us wrong?  Is there a special kind of package you’ve been unable to build because VIPM (until now) didn’t support what you needed?  Are you an enthusiastic VIPM user and you want to help us improve the product before we ship it?

If any of those apply to you, please go here and sign up for the VIPM 2010 Beta Program.

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Learn about methodologies and tools to implement code reuse techniques with LabVIEW, presented by experts. Review use cases on internal code reuse libraries and add-on development for creating a product based on LabVIEW. Example demos include how to build a reusable library from your existing VIs and have them show up in your palettes.

Title: NI LabVIEW Virtual User Group: LabVIEW Code Reuse 101

Date: Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Time: 11:00 AM [US Central Time]

Location: Online Registration (Click Here)

Next Tuesday, May 4th, I will be doing a presentation at Seneca5’s monthly user group meeting. The topic will be Popcorn Tweets: Going Viral with LabVIEW and JKI. Dave Britt (Popcorn Tweets co-creator) and I will be there with the Popcorn Tweets hardware to discuss why we built it & how it all came together, and also to demonstrate & discuss the underlying software architecture of the machine. There will be plenty of time for questions, too!

This is a great opportunity to get a real-life behind-the-scenes look at how a JKI engineer uses the free JKI State Machine to create robust, maintainable (and sometimes fun!) applications using LabVIEW, and how you can do the same. There’s even pizza!

Title: Popcorn Tweets: Going Viral with LabVIEW and JKI

Date: Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Time: 6:30 PM Pizza / 7:00 Meeting

Location: Seneca5 / 419 N. Boylan Ave. / Raleigh, NC

If you’re in the Raleigh area, we hope to see you there!

JKI is proud to announce GTweet: the world’s first Twitter-driven, crowd-sourced LabVIEW software development tool!

A Revolution in Dataflow!

GTweet harnesses the combined powers of Twitter and LabVIEW Scripting to open the door to a whole new way of creating software. No longer is LabVIEW constrained to a single engineer at a single computer. Anyone can collaborate with any number of friends and strangers, to create LabVIEW software together.

Simple, Yet Profound!

Using a special Twitter hashtag, GTweet listens for commands from the global Twitter feed. These commands enable users around the globe to tell LabVIEW exactly which nodes to drop where, which terminals to wire, and any other programming tasks.

And since everyone can GTweet together, GTweet is limited only by the power of your social LabVIEW network!

Social Dataflow has arrived. Click to enlarge.

A New Paradigm in Software Development!

GTweet isn’t just LabVIEW-by-Twitter. It’s a whole new way to think about programming.

It enables your development team to bring the modern thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters theory of software engineering to LabVIEW. By using GTweet, you never have to worry about who is working on a particular VI. Everyone can edit the same VIs in parallel!

More eyes on the code means fewer bugs! More engineers means faster progress!

Social Media, Social LabVIEW!

GTweet merely scratches the surface of social collaboration in LabVIEW. Like Twitter itself, GTweet is merely the gateway to a novel concept that JKI calls social dataflow.

As the social media landscape continues to grow and change, JKI is making sure that LabVIEW, and GTweet, will set the standard. Why just ReTweet, when you can GTweet?

How will GTweet change your life? Tell us in the comments. Or better yet, tweet about it!

Follow JKI on Twitter!

If you use Twitter and you use LabVIEW, you should definitely follow JKI! You can follow the main JKI Software account, and you can also follow some of the individual JKI engineers: Jim, Justin, Michael, Omar, or Tomi. If you pay close attention, you might catch us using GTweet to invent The Next Big Thing in dataflow!

Special Thanks!

JKI would like to thank Darren Nattinger for providing the grammar for GTweet, and also some of the other secret sauce.

What’s New in EasyXML 2.0?

EasyXML 2.0 includes major performance improvements when parsing XML.  It also fixes several bugs.  See the EasyXML 2.0 Release Notes for full details.

Download EasyXML

You can download & install the demo version of EasyXML using VI Package Manager.  Just press the “Check the Network for Available Packages” button to refresh your package list, and then install the jki_lib_easyxml-2.0-1 package.  The demo version of EasyXML is fully functional, but periodically displays a reminder dialog urging you to upgrade to the paid version.

Purchase EasyXML

If you try EasyXML and like it, you can purchase the full version of EasyXML in our store.

Special Discount for Existing EasyXML Customers

JKI is pleased to offer a free upgrade to EasyXML 2.0 for any customers who purchased EasyXML on or after January 1, 2010.  We also offer a 35% discount on EasyXML 2.0 to all other previous EasyXML customers.  If you are an existing EasyXML customer, you should be receiving an email with instructions on how to redeem these discounts.  If you don’t, please send an email to customer-service@jkisoft.com with your original Order # or the email address you used to place the order, and let us know!

Title: Recursion in LabVIEW

Abstract: Many software engineering challenges can be solved efficiently using recursion.  Learn about several ways to implement both recursive algorithms and recursive data structures in LabVIEW and learn how to leverage the full power of multicore CPUs with parallelly recursive algorithm design.

Slides: Recursion-in-LabVIEW-Maila.pdf (362 KB)

Example Code: Recursion-in-LabVIEW-Examples.zip (134 KB; requires LabVIEW 2009 or higher)

Do you have comments or questions about this presentation, or do you have a topic you’d like to see JKI do a presentation on?  Post your ideas in the comments!

Bug photo courtesy of spakattacks.

GOLD
Canada
(Michael)

SILVER
United States of America
(Jim, Justin, Omar)

BRONZE
Finland
(Tomi)

At JKI we’re proud to have a diverse staff of talented professionals from around the globe.  That makes international events like the Olympics particularly exciting, but it’s not often that our home countries make so many of us proud.

Congratulations to Michael, and to Team Canada!

Image: “Golden Flag” by Shayne Kaye (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

If you follow me on Twitter or are my Facebook friend, you would’ve known right away about the LabVIEW-, LEGO Mindstorms-, and Twitter-powered popcorn-popping contraption a friend and I built recently.  We built it to enter a contest, where the object was to make a video showing the “most inventive way to pop this all-American snack.”

Our first idea was a winner:  Crowd-sourced Popcorn.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HsE6tkWCzM

Since we uploaded it last week, the video has gone viral.  It was picked up first by Engadget, but things got really big when it hit Mashable.  Even now, there’s a steady stream of #popcorn tweets on Twitter, as people send the link around and around to their friends.  Most importantly, we won the contest.

What does this have to do with JKI?

If you watch the video, you can clearly see that the famous JKI State Machine plays a starring role.  I got to thinking, though, that the JKI State Machine is by no means the only important piece of the puzzle.  I used a whole bunch of JKI products!

• I used the JKI State Machine as a template for the whole application.
• I used JKI’s VI Package Manager to install the required OpenG libraries and EasyXML.
• I used JKI’s EasyXML to parse the results returned from the Twitter Search API.
• I used the JKI TortoiseSVN Tool for LabVIEW to easily sync the code to my Subversion server.

We didn’t spend a lot of time designing and building the Popcorn Tweets system.  After all, I have a real job at JKI.  But luckily, I live in a world where NI makes great products like LabVIEW, and where NI partners like JKI can extend the platform and provide great tools to help people turn any idea into reality!

Want More Technical Info?

I’ve posted a technical overview of the system on NI’s LabVIEW DIY Crew group.  Check it out!

Tomi is also a well-known figure in the LabVIEW developer community.  His ExpressionFlow blog covers some of the most advanced software engineering topics of any LabVIEW blog, and his work in the field of object-oriented programming in LabVIEW is highly regarded.  He’s also a principal developer of the OpenG Class Templates for LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming.  This continuing support for the LabVIEW community has garnered him the title of National Instruments LabVIEW Champion.  All of these things make him a great addition to the JKI family, and we’re excited to have him.

Welcome, Tomi!