Ken & Mike on the MATLAB DesktopAugust 31st, 2009Pouncing on Snow Leopard
 If you are a Mac user, you’re probably as excited about the recent release of OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) as we are. We’ve been testing MATLAB with developer seeds of Snow Leopard for some time and we’re happy that everyone will now get to use it. You can expect our formal system requirements to be updated in the next several days. We’re especially happy that Snow Leopard is being introduced at (almost) the same time as our R2009b release, which includes a shiny new native 64-bit version of MATLAB on the Mac. This will be a boon to anyone working with large data sets in MATLAB. On the user interface side, you can expect to see new features that Mac users will find especially agreeable – stay tuned to this blog over the next several weeks as we talk about the new UI features in R2009b. We also busily continue to remove the last vestiges of X11 from MATLAB. While it will take a couple more releases to completely expunge it, MATLAB is, for the most part, now free of its X11 heritage. For those migrating to Snow Leopard, you can expect to see the resolution of a couple of irritating UI quirks:
Finally, we also have a few small things to look out for if you’re adopting Snow Leopard. We are working with Apple on all of these issues:
We expect these issues to be resolved very soon in an Apple software update. We look forward to hearing about your MATLAB experiences on Snow Leopard. Will you be upgrading to Snow Leopard in the near future? Do you plan on adopting 64-bit MATLAB? 
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The news that you have mentioned is great. But I notice you omitted any mention of the menu bar. Are MATLAB menus still attached to their windows in R2009b? Or does “free from its X11 heritage” mean that you’ve finally got a standard Mac menu bar in there?
Yonatron –
The menu is still attached to the window and not the top of the screen. We’ve been peeling back layers of this onion for several releases but some technical roadblocks (not related to X11, by the way) still stand in our way.
If any reader has particularly strong feelings about Mac usability concerns like this and is open to a telephone conversation/interview with me, drop me a line at ken.NOSPAMatwell@mathworks.com.
Regards,
KEN ATWELL
I plan on updating when 2009b comes out, but for now, will 2009a work on snow leopard? All I need is basic functionality, not full validation of every feature.
Thanks,
Joe
Joe –
With the exception of the few glitches described above, 9a works well under Snow Leopard.
Regards,
KEN
this all sounds very promising! finally 64 bit! and what a relief to see x11 go!
however i’m very curious to know what the benchmarks are like on snow leopard.
r2009a turned out to be so disappointing on leopard that i had to run my simulations on vista 64 via boot camp on my macbook pro. results from bench on same machine:
- leopard: 0.0847 0.2355 0.1930 0.3340 0.6943 1.4934 i.e. second from bottom!!!!!!!!
- vista 64 via bootcamp with no drivers installed - (1) [0.0648 0.1604 0.2453 0.2550 0.5065 0.3547] (2) [0.1291 0.1239 0.1969 0.2954 0.4225 0.3515] i.e. 2nd from top!
also note that somehow the LU value seems to vary quite a lot on vista 64 bit!!
how do the benchmarks for r2009b on snow leopard compare to the ones vista 64 and linux 64?
and how abt opencl? are they any plans whatsoever to tap into into the gpu?
Thanks for the quick response, Ken. I think it’s fantastic that The MathWorks has so many people blogging, and especially that you’re willing to have a phone conversation to address people’s concerns. The menu bar thing is more of a minor annoyance for me than anything that interferes with my workflow. I usually learn keyboard shortcuts for any commands I use more than a few times. Still, it’s nice for programs to look consistent.
Something with far bigger impact is the way text fields look in MATLAB-created GUI controls. A lot of the time the text is cropped at the top and bottom, rendered almost unreadable. (I’m at work on a Windows box right now, so I can’t whip up a screenshot, but I imagine you’ve heard these complaints before.) Do text boxes look any better in R2009b?
Hi yonatron,
We have bugs reported against the GUIDE rendering issues.
-Ken
ok guys,
here are a couple of observations from my side. I run Matlab 2009a on Snow Leopard on both, a MacBook Pro (2007 version) and a Mac Pro (2008) version. All clean new installs from scratch. Both machines run 32bit Kernels at this time.
Apart from the above descirbed UI quirks no obvious problems.
However, there are issues two issues I envcounter. If I start Matlab from the terminal with
> matlab -nodesktop
I get the following the following warning messages
2009-09-01 08:11:10.060 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×3687900 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.062 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d4f900 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.063 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d637c0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.067 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d68ca0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.067 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d3bc60 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.067 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d3bc80 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.067 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d3bca0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.068 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d386a0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.068 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d386c0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.068 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d5a3d0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.069 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d386e0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-01 08:11:10.069 MATLAB[40393:3503] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×4d683c0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
The second issue is speed. Whereas 2009a was performing somewhat reasonably on Leopard (all through 1.5.8), Matlab now crawls on Snow Leopard. Esp. if I use the parfor - parallel loop option, I get zero speed gains. since I do no longer have a Leopard / Matlab 2009a combination to do benchmarking available, I can only guess that things now run 2 x - 5 x times slower than before? and this really kills usability of Matlab - big time!
does anybody have an idea of what is going on here? is this related to OpenCL? or some 32bit / 62 bit issues?
any help would be appreciated.
greetings, tobias.
ps: I also posted this observations on macresearch.org
I find it interesting that ‘performance’ issues, that is, the abysmal performance of Matlab on any Mac OS version get no response from the Mathworks folks.
Bill,
I’m not sure what you mean by “‘performance’ issues […] get no response from the MathWorks folks”. We’ve commented multiple times about how we’re working to improve performance on the Mac, specifically the rendering pipeline.
-Ken
It’s glad to hear that Matlab 2009b will be 64-bit in Mac!! Cheers
To touch on the performance questions above…
I didn’t talk about performance in the original post because this blog is ostensibly about the desktop UI, but performance is naturally an important topic. One would expect that, all else being equal, OS X would perform roughly the same as others platforms in long-running and compute-intensive situations. However, this is complicated in practice because we build MATLAB with different compilers on different platforms (http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/current_release/mlcompilers.html) and we use libraries that sometimes do not perform consistently across all OS/CPU/threading permutations. In the case of I/O-intensive or graphics-intensive MATLAB applications, we would expect even more variation between platforms because these applications are more “exposed” to variations in the operating systems’ implementation of these services and other external factors (disk and network latency, for example).
This is born out in the BENCH results for R2009b (64-bit) on my Mac (Intel Core i7 running BootCamp with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (RTM)). I used the following script:
Best times:
We can see that Snow Leopard was faster in columns 2,3,5 (FFT, ODE, 2D graphics), but slower in columns in columns 1,6 (LU, 3-D graphics), and very much slower in column 4 (sparse). So, how the Mac will perform relative to other platforms is hard to predict and really depends on the individual application. In the blogosphere I do hear reports of applications in BootCamp/Parallels environments that perform very much worse on OS X than Windows. If your application is among those and you’re in a position where you can share source code with me, please feel free to contact me at ken.NOSPAMatwell@mathworks.com.
There was a question about OpenCL: It is something we’re aware of and looking at with interest, but I cannot make any specific comment or commitment.
Finally, Tobias, I’m willing to dig into the parfor problem you are seeing in Snow Leopard, please contact me. I will also research the NSAutoreleaseNoPool message.
Thanks Kena, I stand corrected… I think. Your discussion about compilers and libraries is helpful.
I just got OS 10.6. So when 2009b comes out I’ll do some benching, but it’ll be with XP, not Win7. I promise to look past the bar chart and into the numbers in the columns. It’s the simple bar chart that makes me go… huh?
I am using the education version of 2009a and so far so good. Not doing much of simulation. But fundamental Matlab components are working as expected.
Thanks for the feedback Michael.
This is persnickity, but I have Matlab 2007a and y axis labels in plots are basically being printed in reverse, so they’re unreadable. I should have switched to 2009 a while ago anyhow.
Yes…I’m having the same issue as Olive, i.e. I’m running Matlab 2007A (haven’t had the budget to upgrade yet) and recently installed Snow Leopard on my macbook pro. Y-axis labels on plots are completely messed up…is there a way to fix this (w/o upgrading, I mean)?
Thank you.
It’s nice to know that matlab is getting better and better on the mac.
On the issue of performance, however, I still find that running Matlab 2009a on a Windows VM via Parallels is much faster (i mean 8x) than the same code running “natively”.
BTW the code is NOT graphically oriented but basic DSP filtering routines.
Still a long way to go. Matlab and Onenote are THE only reason i keep Windows on mac, i look forward to the day when it won’t be necessary.
I am a mac user and interested in buying 2009b as my current version of matlab (R2007a) causes a lot of problem in my intel macbook pro after installing the snow leopard. However I am not able to purchase from the mathwork website.
Please instruct me where I can purchase 2009b. I have two questions as below.
Does the 2009b version support the 64bit snow leopard?
Should I purchase 2009a first and then upgrade it to 2009b?
I wonder if 2009b has been released. If not, when is the expected releasing date?
I forgot to mention that I am a student, so I prefer the student version as it is cheaper.
j (#18), please contact me if you can share your source code.
Honeysyd (#19/20), I believe you can *not* buy the R2009a student version (the latest, which has a 32-bit Mac build) and then upgrade to 9b.
Hello, Kena. Thank you for your prompt reply. According to the mathwork website linked in below, Matlab 2009a student version is now available.
http://www.mathworks.com.au/store/default.do
I wonder if I purchase this product, then it is possible to upgrade it to the 2009b version.
It might be stupid to ask again. Does the 2009b upgraded from the 2009a student version support 64 bit?
Hi honeysyd,
R2009b will be available very, very soon, so I’d recommend waiting for it to be released. As for the pricing of MATLAB, that’s tied closely to your user profile, so make sure you’ve indicated that your usage of MATLAB will be as a student. If you go back to the purchasing page you should see an accurate price.
-Ken
@Olive and Michael,
Thanks for reporting this issue. I’ve reproduced it on a Snow Leopard machine here and submitted a bug.
-Ken
Is there a work around for R2007a to get MATLAB to appear?
If I really do have to upgrade it will be the 3rd time I’ve bought MATLAB in 3 years and I’m absolutely furious about it.
Matt,
We’ve run MATLAB R2007a on Snow Leopard, so you’ll have to elaborate on exactly what’s not working. What are the three versions of MATLAB you’ve had to purchase and what were the reasons you had to upgrade? Was R2007a the most recent version you bought?
-Ken
Okay, now I’ve switched to 2009a. Matlab 2009a and Spaces are not playing well together (previously I was using VirtueDesktops and Tiger with 2007a, which worked fine), and I’m having a host of window management problems. Sometimes the main window will stay on top when I change focus to the editor, Expose only sees some of my Matlab windows, and Dashboard will appear behind Matlab. Basically, all the special window management features are choking, like the Matlab windows are an entirely different species of window from all the other windows. Maybe this needs a reboot more than a software fix, but it hasn’t resolved itself yet and I feel like I wrestling with the computer to reach the editor window.
It’s hard to explain exactly reproduce the problem, because it’s sort of a general squirreliness.
I have matlab 2008a on a macbook on which I recently upgraded to snow leopard. it works ok, but I’m having problems with mmreader. All videos are garbled noise.
I have access to matlab 2009b at work. Does the mmreader/snow leopard bug exist in 2009b? if so, for how long. I’d like to upgrade to snow leopard soon and take advantage of the 64 bit speed, but i’m doing video analysis, so it’s crucial I can access the videos! thanks
-a
Hi adamp,
We’re currently working on a patch for the bug you mention. You can follow the bug here. Upgrading to R2009b won’t fix this issue.
-Ken
I just traded in my powermac g5 for a Xenon mac pro, and put 16gb of RAM in it. I can’t wait to get the 64bit version of MATLAB!
Once it comes out I’ll be able to do all my work that uses large files on my desktop instead of on a server.
I have R2008b but after upgrading to snow leopard the font is all weird and my code does not make any sense at all. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?
Michael
Finally!!! I can’t wait for MATLAB runing the power of 64 bits. I’m working with a big amount of data using sparse matices I’ve niticed that 2008b is 2 times slower than 2007s, are this issue fixed in 2009b version?
It does not find the compiler! As I try to mex a file, I get:
/Applications/MATLAB_R2009a.app/bin/mex: line 1102: gcc-4.0: command not found
-> g++-4.0 -c -I/Applications/MATLAB_R2009a.app/extern/include -I/Applications/MATLAB_R2009a.app/simulink/include -DMATLAB_MEX_FILE -fno-common -no-cpp-precomp -fexceptions -arch x86_64 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.5 -DMX_COMPAT_32 -O2 -DNDEBUG “GetDim.cpp”
/Applications/MATLAB_R2009a.app/bin/mex: line 992: g++-4.0: command not found
From the Terminal, I can run g++ no problem…
This is as disappointing as usual.
I am using the 2009a 64-bit beta. Upgrading to Snow Leopard has been not much of a problem (and I love that I can order my many figure windows in expose with cmd+2!).
I also observe the ‘leaking’ warning, and I get a java error at random intervals when I’m typing/selecting/drag-dropping text in the command window, such as
Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0″ java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 53
at sun.font.FontDesignMetrics.charsWidth(FontDesignMetrics.java:492) [etc]
I found a fix for the history window problem with 2007a.
In Snow leopard, Java 1.5 isn’t installed and everything is just linked to 1.6. You can download or find the JAVA VM version used in leopard and then chose to use that instead using the java preferences in the utilities folder.
Directions (and a link to Java 1.5.0) are here:
http://wiki.oneswarm.org/index.php/OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard
Life is good again.
When will 2009b be available in a student version?
Hi Ross,
Student versions are currently only planned for “a” releases (those come out at the beginning of the year), so there won’t be a student version of R2009b.
Sorry,
-Ken
Weird, I could’ve sworn there was a student version of R2008b. Though I wasn’t expecting it because I’d heard what you just said about the “a” releases. Was there an exception for that one release, or am I just imagining its existence?
Oh, here, found some evidence:
http://www.mathworks.com/company/pressroom/articles/article31236.html
So, did the policy change back to “a”-only? I was thinking of actually plunking down the cash for this one.
i nead desperate help. i am trying to create a .dat file form txt without any success. how can this fixed?
question 2. how in the fuzzy toolbox (fuzzy c-mean clustering), after calculate the fcm, can i see the results? meaning the grade for each data point in order to write down the general U matrix. thank you much
Dan (#33), can you confirm that the gcc you are using is the same version that MATLAB supports (see http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/release2009a/macintosh.html for 9a information)? If so, please contact support.
xrhstos (#40, #41), can you contact support with these questions?
Hi. I’m having problems trying to install 2009b on a macbook pro running snow leopard. I start the installer, it asks for my admin password and then quits. In the console the following messages appear:
9/15/09 9:47:34 AM [0×0-0×3d03d0].InstallForMacOSX 2009-09-15 09:47:34.190 MathWorksInstallerBE[10251:e07] *** -[NSKeyedUnarchiver initForReadingWithData:]: data is empty; did you forget to send -finishEncoding to the NSKeyedArchiver?
9/15/09 9:47:34 AM [0×0-0×3d03d0].InstallForMacOSX 2009-09-15 09:47:34.192 MathWorksInstallerBE[10251:e07] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting
Any idea?
@yonatron,
The “a”-only policy for the student version has been like this for a while. R2008b was an exception.
Sorry,
-Ken
ok, update from my side. it turns out that the parallelization has not suffered from the update to Snow Leopard in 2009a - at least not in my example. most probably, it was the programmer, i.e. myself, who was to excited about updating while not making sure that his code was still running bug free (so much for parallelization).
also, thanks to Ken for insights and discussion, tobias.
I was able to solve my Matlab student version 2007a issues by installing java 1.5 on Snow Leopard. I following the direction at: http://chxor.chxo.com/post/183013153/installing-java-1-5-on-snow-leopard
but used the latest update from apple instead of update 4 I used update 5 at: http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac_OS_X_10_5_Update_5
I then selected java J2SE 5.0 32 bit, in Java Preferences (in utilities folder) as my default.
I hope this helps others.
I will be switching over my Macpro laptop over to Snow Leopard soon. But I am not sure about installing Matlab on it due to the notorious performance issues of Matlab on OSX. I have tried it and ditched it. I currently run Matlab on my Linux box at work. And when I am at home, I’d rather use VNC to connect to my Linux box at work than deal with Matlab on my Macpro laptop.
Please show the benchmark results of Matlab running on the same Mac quad-booting OSX, Linux, and Windows (Vista & 7). If they are comparable, I’ll definitely buy another license for my laptop.
Steve (@47) –
Expanding on my earlier post (@12), here are Ubuntu 9.04 numbers too. Remember that lower-is-better:
LU FFT ODE Sparse 2-D 3-D Window 7 0.0389 0.0936 0.1879 0.2130 0.5026 0.4422 10.6 0.0468 0.0835 0.1827 0.4425 0.4225 0.5211 Ubuntu 9.04 0.0527 0.0805 0.1711 0.2069 0.5754 0.7652These numbers are for the 64-bit version of R2009b on the same physical machine (eight-core Xeon i7 with NVIDIA graphics). Sorry, I don’t have a Windows Vista partition on this box, but I would expect it to perform similarly to Windows 7.
R2009b on 64-bit MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard.
$~> matlab -nodesktop -nosplash
gives following errors:
2009-09-30 01:21:25.806 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×106075ef0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.808 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103eed280 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.809 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×1060757b0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.837 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×106000e00 of class NSCFNumber autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.838 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef6900 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.838 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef41a0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.839 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef5790 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.840 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef5020 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.840 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef4760 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.841 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×103ef2840 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.869 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×1060767b0 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.869 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×10601ea50 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2009-09-30 01:21:25.870 MATLAB[3244:3803] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×106075f60 of class NSCalibratedRGBColor autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
FYI version -java gives
Java 1.6.0_15-b03-219 with Apple Inc. Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM mixed mode
It seems to be working without problem though.
Any clues?
–Abhay
Just to chime in - I followed Antonio’s (#46) suggestions and it fixed my problem with funky text produced by the ylabel command on plots! Thanks!
Hi,
This might be a simple question, but I just installed R2009b, and also just upgraded to Snow Leopard. Everything seems to be working fine, except that I notice in the Current Folder window, it does not display all my files in that window. I thought maybe it was an issue of not recognizing files made before a certain date, but even new files that I create inside matlab don’t get displayed. Is this a bug, or did I miss the checkbox to display all files somewhere?
Thanks for the help.
I’m having issues with Matlab on my MBP - using OS X 10.6.1 and MatLab 2009b. the editor won’t work. I get this error:
Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0″ java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.osgi.framework.Bundle
Anything I can do to fix it?
Thanks
Followup to #52: David and I resolved this issue. It turned out that he had another classpath.txt from 2008 that was confusing MATLAB. Moving this classpath.txt file out the way took care of things.
I may have a problem to do with this thread.
Had student version 2007a, xp sp2 which worked fine. I’ve just started a masters course so I made the leap to mac :) now have a macbook pro running snow leopard and was able to install ok, but not to activate.
Tried to activate through mathworks website but can’t find text file containing machine code.
Looks like I might find a whole other load of issues once I can activate matlab but I’ll start there. It doesn’t help that I’m a completely new mac user as well!
Phil, if you are looking for the machine ID it is the MAC address, that you can get from Terminal with this command.
Or you could go to the Network pane in System preferences and click on Airport or Ethernet connection, go to Advanced and click on the last tab (that says ethernet) to get the MAC address.
Any plans on using LLVM compiler on Mac. I believe Snow Leopard comes with LLVM
For someone who has only used the X11 variant of matlab on mac can you post some screenshots of the new UI, before i think of upgrading
@Ziyad,
As we’ve mentioned a number of times before on this blog, the MATLAB user interface does *not* use X11 — it’s written in Java which has Cocoa underpinnings on the Mac.
The overall look and feel has not changed from R2009a to R2009b.
-Ken
Ken,
I understand that you don’t use X11 but X11 is started when I run Matlab R2009b on Snow Leopard. Matlab is killed when I kill X11.
This happens with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Matlab. What am I missing? Please feel free to write to joelr1 at gmail.com
Joel,
Let me elaborate a bit on our use of X11. It has been the case for a number of years that the MATLAB Desktop itself is written in Java, essentially using native widgets, so there is no such things as a before-and-after X11 screenshot on the Mac (@57).
Going back to the original blog posting, there are still limited uses of X11 (Figure window callback handling for one) in MATLAB. So, yes, if you kill X11 you will take MATLAB down with it (@59). The dependency on X11 is declining release-to-release, and virtually all visible graphical elements in MATLAB are non-X11, but it will take a few more releases before all dependencies are removed and the bouncing X11 icon upon start-up disappears for good.
-Ken
Followed recommendations in this comment (#46), and it worked perfectly! No problems now. Thanks.
I’m having the same problem as Marcelo.
I’m running an early 2008 Mac Pro, and upgraded to Snow Leopard *before* installing Matlab 2009b.
The installer script prematurely exits with the error
-[NSKeyedUnarchiver initForReadingWithData:]: data is empty; did you forget to send -finishEncoding to the NSKeyedArchiver?
Is there a workaround for this?
I recently upgraded my Tiger OS to Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and I can’t manage to install Matlab R2008b correctly. Every time I try to open the application it says there’s an error saying it can’t load the library when trying to activate it. It used to work fine in Tiger. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.
Hi Ken,
I can’t launch Matlab (2009b) by double-clicking the associated files (m-, fig-, mat-files) on my Finder/ PathFinder (Snow Leopard). They are associated with ‘Matlab.app’. When I link them with ‘Matlab_R2009b.app’, Matlab will launch but I can’t open up the linked files. In other words: Linking the files with ‘Matlab.app’ in the file browser will launch Matlab but does not open up the file. Linking them with ‘Matlab_R2009b.app’ instead *won’t* launch Matlab but can be used to open documents once Matlab is up already…
Any ideas to how to link files properly to launch Matlab *and* to get them opened up in Matlab? Anyone else experiencing similar problems?
Best,
Thomas
Just installed R2009b Mac Pro 8 core machine with Snow Leopard and 10 GB RAM. Matlab is crawling — delay after every keystroke, rendering is glacial — bench 3D is 16 seconds; an order of magnitude slower than any other system in the bench list. My 8 core machine is at the very bottom of the list. System has plenty of memory free — over 5 GB. Restarting Matlab doesn’t help. Any ideas??
@Thomas,
Thanks for the report. We’ve only recently become aware of this problem and have not fully characterized it yet. We’ll post more information once we have it, but for now it looks like you need to open your MATLAB files within MATLAB and not the Finder.
-Ken
Fixed problem referenced above (#65)…
First, the speed issue was only with graphics and keystroke response. Non-graphics bench tests were fast. I discovered the graphics slowdown was because too many files were open in the editor. After closing almost all editor files and restarting, things were fast.
An interesting contrast… Matlab 2007a, my previous version (from which I copied the MATLABDesktop.xml file when I installed R2009b), runs blazing fast with all of the same files in the editor. So there must be a difference in the way these two versions handle the editor cache and how that affects graphics speed. To the tune of 16 seconds for 3D bench (R2009b) vs. 0.8 seconds (2007a). Interesting.
Brian
I have just upgraded to 2009b on a MacPro 8 core machine. I’m having the problem that matlab immediately stops if I run the script example.m from the command line (matlab -nojvm -r example). The splash screen appears and afterwards, matlab stops. Disabling the splash screen using -nosplash does not change anything, except that there is no splash screen (as expected). Any ideas ?
Hello,
I’m a student too. And I can’t currently afford another version of Matlab, so I stuck with 2007a and Snow Leopard. I already red the previous posts an installed the java 1.5. So far it works.
But now I run in trouble with other software, because I had set the JVM 1.5 as first.
My question: Is there a way like editing the info.plist (or a script) so only Matlap uses the 1.5 version and the all other software runs with 1.6?
thx for help
Christian
@Brian,
It appears that you may be seeing this issue:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/bugreports/412219
Try the fix listed in that issue and let us know if that helps.
-Ken
I am running Matlab 2009b on a Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard.
The first run of bench is pretty slow. Interestingly, subsequent runs can be much faster!
first run:
0.2087 0.3393 0.2374 0.3910 0.8831 1.4489
later run:
0.0817 0.1398 0.1892 0.3254 0.5410 0.7869
With reference to the comment that Matlab on OS X doesn’t X11 for its interface, isn’t Simulink part of Matlab? I’m running Simulink v7.4 on R2009b (latest) and the interface looks like an old Motif-X11 pprogram.
Feels very outdated, especially when the manual says to drag-and-drop blocks… and that doesn’t appear to work with the X11 version of Simulink.
Hi Shen-Hsiao,
Simulink is a separate product that uses the MATLAB engine.
-Ken
All this Java/X11 nonsense has been dragging on way too long. Any change for a native version in the near future or am I saddled with Parallels for a while? Cheers
Another question: Happily I have recently migrated from Windows to a mac, but something I really miss when changing from Octave to Matlab is the ability to right click in a plot window and drag a rectangle to replot the graph using the new coordinates defined by the rectangle. Is this functionality exclusive to Octave, or is there a bug in Matlab (or am I just missing something)? Cheers, Ed.
Hi Ed,
To zoom the figure, you need to select the magnifying glass with a plus sign. If you’d like another way to access this functionality, you can submit a feature request:
http://blogs.mathworks.com/desktop/2008/01/14/making-a-feature-request/
-Ken
I am having the same problem as Faria Ahmad (post 63). When I install R2007a Student Version on Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and try to activate Matlab, X11 opens, and then I see an “Activate Matlab” program open, and then I get the following error messages:
1) Unable to load native library
2) There was an unexpected exception. See the log file
(/var/folders/zt/ztu4dDmnGQOb1hM28RXl0k+++TI/-Tmp-/TMW_svact.log) for more details.
Any ideas?
Thanks much.
Hi, can someone please post screen captures of MATLAB r2009b running on Snow Leopard, I am interested in the interface if there is any difference between r2009a & r2009b’s interface.
Thanks in advance.
Hello, I am running Matlab R2007a student version. I just switched over to snow leopard and I think I am having the same garbled text problem (perhaps related to Java), as was mentioned on this page. I think it might be the same bug reported here http://www.mathworks.com/support/bugreports/search_results?commit=Search&keyword=576529&release=168&release_filter=Exists+in&search_executed=1&selected_products=
I was curious if this work around will work for R2007a, or if I am having a different problem. I noticed that some people suggested downloading an older version of Java to fix this (unless they are two separate problems), but I was reluctant to do that if not necessary b/c I didn’t want to risk messing up other programs. I really need my text, and images, to display correctly though.
Thanks
I’ve been having the same issue that Olive (#16) and Michael (#17) have with 2007a but with 2008a - all y axis labels are printed in reverse (mirrored). This only happened once I upgraded to snow leopard. Is there a way to fix this? It’s quite annoying to have all the y axis labels illegible.
The buttons in uisetcolor are cut off by more than a few pixels. Only a few pixels remain on the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons, making it hard to use for anyone that doesn’t know ‘OK’ is on the right.
Hi Dan,
That’s a known issue and we’re working with Apple to fix it.
-Ken
Hi, I am new for Matlab on Mac. Is parallel computing turned on by default? I cannot see the option for configuring parallel computing in the preferences menu like in R2008 on Windows.
I had the same problem and the fix is to go Applications\Java Preferences and specify that 32bit version of Java should be the default.