Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

October 19th, 2009

I’d like to welcome guest blogger Ken Atwell from the MATLAB Product Management team this week to talk about our support of Windows 7.

Here at The MathWorks we’ve been using and testing MATLAB against pre-releases of Windows 7 for some time now. And we know we’re not the only ones, as we’ve seen thousands of MATLAB activations under Windows 7, even though Windows 7 will not be formally release until the end of this week! I’m happy to report that we’ve fully tested and are now officially supporting the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of R2009a (including Student Version) and R2009b. You can see read our official statement here, and we’ve updated our System Requirements pages in the last several days accordingly.

We expect a smooth MATLAB experience when using these modern releases of MATLAB on Windows 7. We expect older versions of MATLAB to work as well (see our statement for potential gotchas), but is not a supported configuration. If you’re using R2009a, we did find one glitch unique to Windows 7 that was fixed for R2009b: If you shell out to the console with the ! shell escape “operator” in MATLAB, Ctrl+C often will not break out of an operation should you choose to abort it. There is no work-around beyond “don’t do that”. Again, this was resolved for 9b and seems to impact Windows 7 only.

Here are two nice usability improvements that I thought I would share:

1. If you mouse over the MATLAB icon in the Windows taskbar, you’ll get thumbnails of all of your MATLAB windows. This may be helpful when you need to locate an undocked Figure window of a GUI that got itself stacked under the MATLAB Desktop or another application.
   
   
2. The “Windows” key on your keyboard will pop-up the Start menu, which you can quickly filter by typing a character or two in the name of the app you wish to launch. No more hunting through the Program Files hierarchy! For me, Windows->”fi” is enough to find Firefox, Windows->”it” is enough to find iTunes, and (of course) Windows->”ma” finds MATLAB. This is great way to find and launch frequently-used applications while keeping your hands on the keyboard. (And, okay, I admit this feature was introduced in Windows Vista, but it is just too good not to share!)

What are your plans for migrating to Windows 7 (or are you already there)? Any productivity tips for fellow MATLAB users?

-by Ken Atwell, The MathWorks

By Ken Orr

Ken is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. He loves the art of graphic design as well as developing visually pleasing user interfaces - he's one of those 'crazy' Mac guys!

12:30 UTC | Posted in Windows | Permalink |

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12 Responses to “Is 7 your lucky number?”

1. John replied on October 19th, 2009 at 14:53 UTC :
   

   This was commented on in one of the past threads. Is there any way to get Matlab to be a little more ‘taskbar-aware’ in Windows 7? Right now, if you pin Matlab to the taskbar, clicking on the icon creates a second group of taskbar icons.

   It’s a little annoying because I end up clicking on the wrong set of icons and relaunching matlab, when all I mean to do is switch to the copy I have running.

   I realize that some users may want the freedom to open multiple copies of Matlab, but the behaviour right now seems to fight against the intended use of the Win7 taskbar.

2. kena replied on October 20th, 2009 at 00:51 UTC :
   

   John, thanks for the question. We’ve noticed this too and it is something we hope to address in the next release or two. Incidentally, this is happening because MATLAB is launched through a “helper” app, and MATLAB is currently not built in a way that allows Windows to recognize that the helper app and the “real” app are parts of the “same” application.

3. Ben replied on October 20th, 2009 at 05:08 UTC :
   

   Still using Windows XP and no plans to upgrade to Windows 7. Please don’t stop supporting Windows XP anytime soon.

   Further still, my Athlon XP processor has no support for SSE2, so I am stuck using R2007b.

4. XaL replied on October 20th, 2009 at 06:06 UTC :
   

   Still using Matlab and Simulink on Linux, even if Mathworks consideration for Linux is lower than from Windows.
   Example: the Simulink GUI is different under Windows and Linux, even for the R2009b, and the lack of Windows GUI toolbar annoying.
   I hope this will be fixed in a (near) future release?
   Thanks

5. Drazick replied on October 20th, 2009 at 06:40 UTC :
   

   When will you use Windows 7 Technologies such as Direct Compute?

   Or even better, Open CL as a wide standard.

6. Daniel Armyr replied on October 20th, 2009 at 06:44 UTC :
   

   Well, so far Windows 7 is getting OK reviews, but I’ll wait another two years to see if it is better than XP, unless Ubuntu has taken over completely by then.

7. Oliver Woodford replied on October 20th, 2009 at 14:08 UTC :
   

   Guys, this is off topic, but what’s the deal with the Alphabetize option for the list of files open in the editor? If I select it, it alphabetizes the tabs, but then when I load a new file it gets put to the bottom of the list (i.e. not alphabetized). So the option behaves as a one-shot process, yet it needs to be toggled on and off. There seems to be an inconsistency there. What bugs me is that every time I want to re-alphabetize my tabs I have to go through the whole process (of right click, left click on Alphabetize) twice, toggling it off then on again.
   Oliver

8. Ken replied on October 20th, 2009 at 14:44 UTC :
   

   Hi Oliver,

   The Alphabetize option should keep things in alphabetical order all the time, once you’ve selected it. I verified that this is the case in R2008b, R2009a and R2009b — what version are you running?

   -Ken

9. Oliver Woodford replied on October 20th, 2009 at 15:07 UTC :
   

   I’m running 64-bit R2009b on Ubuntu 9.04, and calling edit - it definitely doesn’t work here. It used to do this in the Windows version too (I first noticed it in R2007b), but checking it just now in R2009b on Windows I can see it’s been fixed there :).

10. Ken replied on October 20th, 2009 at 15:29 UTC :
    

    Hi Oliver,

    Turns out there is a bit of a bug here — and it happens on all platforms. If “Alphabetize” is on when your start MATLAB, the context menu’s item will show a check mark, but we aren’t performing the actual alphabetizing.

    I’ll file a bug report.

    Thanks for finding this.
    -Ken

11. Ken Atwell (MathWorks) replied on October 23rd, 2009 at 17:11 UTC :
    

    Ben (@3), we’ll be supporting Windows XP for the foreseeable future. You can get a look at our future plans at http://www.mathworks.com/support/sysreq/roadmap.html.

    Drazick (@5), we are aware of DirectCompute/OpenCL/CUDA/… and looking at these technologies with interest, but I cannot make any specific comment or commitment.

12. Eddie replied on November 11th, 2009 at 18:29 UTC :
    

    “Right now, if you pin Matlab to the taskbar, clicking on the icon creates a second group of taskbar icons. “

    Easily fixed. Run Matlab from the start menu, then when the program is running, right click on the taskbar icon and click pin. This will pin the actual app, not the launcher, thus solving the problem…

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a = magic(3);
sum(a)
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These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.