8.0.0
I’m trying to place some text in the middle of the coordinate container, but there are no alignment tools to use 
I want to bump this because, to me, is a shocking omission for Ignition 8.0.
While the new alignment feature is nice, it is TERRIBLE when you have lots of small items in the view. Trying to stack 10 items all 5 pixels apart from each other is a simple button click in Vision. Now it’s an extremely difficult task, involving using the mouse to first align it close to where it should go and then using the keyboard to move it the last few pixels.
Additionally, when aligning small items of slightly different sizes, the Auto-Alignment jumps between trying to use the lower, center and upper bounds for alignment. This would be made much easier if there was still a Zoom feature, but that was removed too.
Seriously, why get rid of all of those things that made it SO easy to create orgazined, neat windows??
While, agreed, there are features missing from the design experience in Perspective, there are two important things to note:
- Nothing was removed from Perspective - it just hasn’t been implemented. Perspective is a completely different technology stack from top to bottom; it was never going to have exact feature parity with a ten year old product out of the gate.
- You can zoom in Perspective - right click the ‘100%’ indicator in the status bar, towards the lower right. We have an active ticket to add ctrl + mousewheel to make this easier to use.
Also, a fun trick (assuming you’re in a coordinate container, which you presumably are if you’re worrying about precise pixel positioning) - if you have some components that you want to put on a specific line, you can multi-select them and then enter a specific x or y coordinate value - thus lining all of them up at once. You could also copy the view JSON out to a text editor and fix them all there, if that was faster.
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You can do the same thing in the Vision client by clicking CTRL-p when you've multi-selected items and change the x or y position.
However, the omission of the stack alignment feature is shocking. Is there an active ticket to add this feature into the Perspective views?
Forgot to mention. The right-click to access the zoom ability for the page is not intuitive UI. I had seen the 100% in the bottom right corner and left-clicked. Since nothing happened, I assumed the feature was just missing.
Why not have icons for this feature at the top of the screen? There is tons of space for it.
Please read:
We're working on providing many, many features and tricks and things no one has even thought of yet, but it's going to take some time. The presence of ANY UI - even if it's not the best - means that this would get a lower priority when compared to something that has no current UI. Be patient.
It’s worth noting that, in my experience, Ignition is the ONLY scada I’ve seen that actually has the stack alignment tool, so consider yourself lucky it has it at all 
As the others have already said, it’s rev 1 of a compelety new product. I started Ignition in v7, but I’ll bet v1 was nowhere near what Perspective v1 is today in terms of its features and quality. Have faith 
Heh, newbies.
Ignition started with v7.0. Prior to that was the FactorySQL/FactoryPMI duo. Some major version numbers were skipped. It does make one imagine the wonders that will arrive with v9.0. (-:
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I guess I had used V 6.4 in 2015 when I started using Ignition! Don't know what the previous versions were called then!
Good to hear that! The new SVG/CANVAS technologies indeed offer many new rich features like anti-aliasing, smooth transitions of position movements, fading , shading etc! I am sure it will try to leverage all of that to bring unprecedented user experience that no other SCADA has it right now.
However its a trade off between feature richness and efforts! What's minimum requirement for an HMI? Industrial HMI is not CAD ! It should just clearly display numbers, colors , animations etc for ease of Monitoring ! I don't know if there are any Specifications for an Industrial HMI ? Otherwise its anybody's wish what he wants to see and achieve on the screen!
Uh, no. This should jog your memory:
I guess it was 7.6.4 that I was using! Only 7.7 was released in ICC - BUILD - 2015 Sept, which I got confused with version 7!.
My biggest problem right now is that you guys released what feels, at least to me, like a beta product. I understand that this is a radical shift from Vision and that you needed to shift to a non-Java HTML 5 based rendering system. I understand that this is going to take time to get right. However, it has been released as THE NEW VERSION of Ignition. If it's not ready for prime-time, it should stay in Beta testing.
I really like Ignition and I want to keep using it and supporting it. It has powerful features that I have never seen in any other product, at a price point that is hard to beat. Unfortunately, this new version has me really scratching my head.
I keep reading in these forums that the features are going to keep coming? Is there a forum post where I can see the planned features with some kind of timeframe on when they will be released? I have clients that would LOVE to have a mobile scada that works seamlessly from their phone's browser. The original mobile module doesn't cut it and we were very hopeful for this new release.
However, as of today there are too many features "missing" from Perspective that I would not recommend to these clients to use this product in its current state.
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There're definitely problems, but I think you are being unduly harsh. Or have unrealistic expectations: Ignition v8 is not just Perspective. The platform has improvements and new features all over the place that justify the release, even if Perspective isn't feature complete. Things like:
- Jython 2.7 (!!)
- Single port SSL (no longer needs both SSL and non-SSL ports for SSL clients)
- Java 11+ support in the Designer and in Vision (new look & feel)
- Souped up tag architecture, with UDT parameters as 1st class properties
- Project Inheritance
- File-based Project Resources for Source Code Management support
- New OPC/UA server architecture (with method support)
The (unlamented) Mobile Module is gone, but as far as I'm concerned, Perspective is already a win for mobile. And if you need Ignition's long track record of features and functionality, Vision is still there to serve. Perspective is not ready to do it all, and wasn't pitched that way.
Yeah, there's still an unfortunate number of bugs to be squashed. Which means I'm not upgrading customers' mission critical systems, yet. But that's more of a ".0" thing than anything else. And some of those probably won't upgrade to 8.0 anyways, as 8.0 is not an LTS.
I'll be switching my focus for new projects to v8 with either 8.0.2 or 8.0.3, and doing upgrades where it makes sense. For some reason, there's been a fair number of reports here of people upgrading blind -- no pre-upgrade testing. That's a sure recipe for grief.
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Thanks for that. I guess I am being a bit harsh.
My complaints are entirely with the Perspective module. It’s the only part of v8 that I have dug into and I really was expecting more from the official release version. Some of the things that are not there seem bizarre given Ignition’s track record and how feature rich the Vision module is.
I was very excited for this new mobile ready windowing system because I have a client that is a perfect fit. We are currently in the process of rolling out several systems for this client and the v8 release seemed timed perfect for adding the mobile features. The Mobile Module was not good enough and I was hoping that out of the gate I would be able to port this client over to v8 to get the mobile features. But from what I have seen, I am not interested in using it as it currently stands.
I think deep down I also worry that Inductive is taking a really big leap here and right now it feels like they are stumbling. The release of Perspective feels rushed to meet a deadline. I know they have stated that Vision is not going away, but it seems hard to believe that, in the long run, they are going to be able to support two entirely different windowing systems while keeping both feature rich and up to date. Only time will tell on this one.
By the way, what does Jython 2.7 add? I haven’t read up on what the difference between 2.5 and 2.7 is. Anything significant?
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There are core syntactic differences between 2.5 and 2.7 that make it really difficult to backport any modern v2.7 python code in jython 2.5. This is an issue because in the rest of the python world, only v2.7 is still supported in the 2.x family, and even that is officially dying soon. Jython will eventually reach 3.x (I believe), but getting 2.7 into Ignition will be a big help in the meantime.
danFromNj - first of all thanks for all the honest feedback, we appreciate it. You make a number of valid points, and I think that Phil and Cody and Paul have basically laid out the “rebuttal” pretty well, but let me add my point of view.
First of all, it is crucial to remember that Perspective is not “the new version of Ignition”. It is a new module that we have introduced. Ignition 8 has tons of new stuff besides Perspective ranging from massive performance and memory improvements, Java embedding/launching, totally re-vamped project system, brand-new security structure, etc.
Now, your primary complaint is the lack of alignment buttons. Perfectly valid complaint, these will get added soon. (They’re slightly trickier to implement in Perspective than they were in Vision, because of the variety of different container layout strategies that Perspective employs. These tools will really only work for coordinate containers, but that’s ok, we know that coordinate containers are commonplace) I would point out that Perspective does take a different design mindset than Vision did. Want a stack of components, neatly spaced out? The more “Perspective-esque” way to do this would be to just throw them in a flex container set to column mode!
From our point of view, these buttons squarely fall into the “product polish” bucket. We have a list of hundreds of polish items like these. Each one will make the product more convenient, easier to use, and behind each item is someone for whom that is the killer feature that they can’t believe we shipped without. It’s not that we “rushed” Perspective to meet a deadline. The reality more complicated, but a big part of it is that we had many beta customers who were using Perspective since last September, and wanted it to be released so they could use it in production! If we had told them “no, no, you can’t yet, wait another year while we implement every polish item” they would have clubbed us over the head I think. So yes, alignment buttons did not make the cut for the initial release.
A tricky situation we’re in right now is that we have such a varied audience. We have some folks who say: “give it to me, I can do so much with it already!” and others who are say “Hey! how come it doesn’t have everything that Vision has?!” Vision has 14 years of continuous development under its belt, so yeah, it has more features. You mentioned that you find the initial release of Perspective “bizarre” based on our “track record”. In reality, our track record is that we release tools when we think they’re useful, and then we iterate on improving them relentlessly as people use them, making them faster and easier. In fact a motto we have around here is “First make it possible, then make it easy”. That’s the reality of our track record, it’s just that you probably weren’t around for the early days of Vision so it might not be immediately apparent anymore.
So I guess all I’m saying is: I’m sorry if the 1.0.0 release of Perspective didn’t live up to everything you were hoping for, but please stick with it and be patient because it’s just the beginning, and we need tough feedback like yours to help us prioritize our long to-do list!
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Besides this, migration to the latest technology is essential to avoid technological obsolescence. Tomorrow old technology will be phased out with new ones like HTML5, Mobiles phones etc and we need to stay upgraded. Who knows something else may come up day after tomorrow like web assembly etc. we have to progressively keep ourselves up to date.