Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

January 5th, 2009

Happy New Year!

Mike and I hope to have another productive year, filled with shiny new features and a polished up Desktop. We made New Years resolutions to help guide our day-to-day work on the MATLAB Desktop…you can hold us to these!

As we sit on the door step of 2009, with the release of R2009a only a few months away, we’d love for you to tell us what you’d most like to see in the MATLAB Desktop in 2009 (though many of you have already been doing that here)!

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14:37 UTC | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink | 14 Comments »

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14 Responses to “Happy New Year!”

  1. Aurélien Queffurust replied on January 6th, 2009 at 08:32 UTC :

    Happy new year guys! Ok I have 2 ideas (which would’nt be a major enhancement!)

    1) What about a new link from the MATLAB Start Button which will open the blogs page?
    Currently we can only open the main page of MATLAB Central, access the newsgroup or the FEx.

    2) The SUPPORT function already exists , the BLOGS function could be easily implemented in the same way?!

  2. Ken replied on January 6th, 2009 at 14:46 UTC :

    Hi Aurelien,

    This is an interesting idea! I’ll bounce it off of a few other MathWorkers. Applications in general seem to blurring the line between local and external content.

    Thanks for the great feedback,
    -Ken

  3. Cnenf replied on January 7th, 2009 at 00:47 UTC :

    Hey guys, happy 2009, keep up the great work!

  4. Ian replied on January 8th, 2009 at 17:53 UTC :

    Well, us Mac users are hoping for a version which is not as slow as molasses compared to Windows (check using bootcamp, bench differences are highly significantly different), and that is more native (as you allude to). BUT most importantly, I want the GUIDE GUIs developed on one platform to be as usable when used on another. At the moment, making a Matlab GUI in Windows and using it on OS X, all the widgets are cut off and text is illegible. If that is a side-effect of using Aqua widgets, well I’d rather you had *less* platform integration. I just want a system which works without these issues!

  5. Ken replied on January 9th, 2009 at 00:49 UTC :

    Hi Ian,

    As a Mac user, I’m right there with you – I want a more Mac like version as well. There are many other developers here at The MathWorks working to make this a reality. The performance issues you mention…are you referencing actual computational speed, figure drawing speed or user interface feel?

    I’ve forwarded your comment/request regarding GUIDE on to the appropriate team.

    Thanks for the feedback Ian,
    -Ken

  6. Giovanni Piredda replied on January 12th, 2009 at 08:55 UTC :

    For what regards the performance of Matlab on OS X, there is difference in all parts of the “bench” test except LU decomposition. I have also tried the bench command both on OS X and on Windows XP (same computer, same version of Matlab, XP running with bootcamp) and on OS X FFT is 1.7 times slower, ODE is 1.9 times slower, Sparse is 1.3 times slower, 2-D is 2.6 times slower and 3-D 1.4 times slower; LU is approximately equal. I have read of similar results from other people.

  7. Ken replied on January 12th, 2009 at 13:19 UTC :

    Hi Giovanni,

    Thanks for the numbers – I’ve forwarded along this information.

    -Ken

  8. Giovanni Piredda replied on January 12th, 2009 at 14:50 UTC :

    Thanks for that. I would be curious to know what the difference in speed depends on (especially but not only in the case that it cannot be modified by much). But maybe this is a question for the Matlab newsgroup rather than for this blog.

    G.

  9. Mike replied on January 12th, 2009 at 18:19 UTC :

    Giovanni,

    What version of MATLAB are you comparing with? Are you using a pre-release version?

    Mike

  10. Giovanni Piredda replied on January 13th, 2009 at 09:57 UTC :

    The results I quoted are for release R2008b. The preceding release, R2008a, behaves in a similar way; and the pre-release R2009a does not seem to be significantly faster.

  11. Giovanni Piredda replied on January 13th, 2009 at 10:03 UTC :

    Just for reference here you are the web link to a post in which someone observes something similar, always for R2008b – but in this case not with the “bench” command but with a program they use for their research.

    G.

  12. Ian replied on January 20th, 2009 at 12:41 UTC :

    Dear Ken,

    As Giovanni mentions, performance is slower across the board for us OS X users (using bench). Note I have ensured Matlab is using Quartz (typing ” java.lang.System.getProperty(‘apple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz’)” at the matlab commandline should return true), and also tested with 2008a and 2008b.

    What is interesting is that OpenGL performance itself is faster in OS X than XP independent of Matlab for me. Something about XWindows causes Matlab to turn to treacle in drawing speed.

    Again, returning to GUIDE, I always ensure the same font is available on both platforms, and try to follow the cross-platform guidelines but GUIDE still causes clipping issues for UI widgets on OS X.

  13. Andrew replied on July 15th, 2009 at 06:10 UTC :

    Hello Ian,

    I’ve found this blog post while crawling the internet for solutions to MATLAB R2009A’s abysmal GUI performance under OSX 10.5.7 (and 10.5.6). Aside from the poor “bench” performance that is well documented on the internet, I am wondering if you have any advice on how to enable MATLAB to use Quartz instead of Java.

    I tried your code to check if MATLAB is using Quartz and get “false” as a return.

    I have tried the method suggested here:

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007112503413229

    And found that R2009a already comes with the ‘java.opts’ file with the line of code that is supposed to enable Quartz. However no matter what I do with the file (removing the comments, placing the file in the other locations suggested by the website, etc), I cannot get MATLAB to use Quartz, as I still get a “False” response.

    There is also the perceptual difference in using software that feels like it is running on a sub-1 Ghz computer (the quarter to half second that it takes for Matlab to confirm “a=3″, and the molasses like scrolling experienced in M-files.

    Do you have suggestions on how to enable Quartz on MATLAB R2009A under OS X running a Mac Pro? I have been able to get Quartz running under R2008B on a Macbook Pro…

  14. Ken replied on July 15th, 2009 at 10:45 UTC :

    Hi Andrew,

    Follow the instructions here:

    http://www.mathworks.com/support/bugreports/412219

    -Ken

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Mike works on the MATLAB Desktop team.

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