Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

December 28th, 2009

Now that 2009 is almost at a close, I thought I’d share my retrospective. Based on the number of comments and hits to our web pages, the most popular topics this year were platform issues and news, Emacs, and GUIs. It’s no surprise that the best received and viewed posts pertained to the MATLAB Editor, since Ken and I both worked primarily on the Editor during the past year. Your feedback has been great and learning about what interests our audience helps us decide what to write about. Our three most popular posts of 2009, in terms of comments:

1. Pouncing on Snow Leopard
2. It’s the Little Things That Count
3. Tab to Narrow Completions

We’ve heard you loud and clear about platform fidelity and competitiveness with other Editors. I think we made great strides in those areas in 2009, and have wonderful things planned for 2010.

I also learned that free t-shirts are not a good motivator for getting responses. I think next time I’ll try free copies of Emacs or chocolate peanut butter.

The big surprise for me is the rate at which new comments continue to come in our uitable post. Well that, and ending up the owner of this blog barely a year after Ken and I officially took it over. Next year I plan on having the same set of regular guest posters as well as some new faces to help out with the articles.

At the beginning of the year, Ken and I made some new year’s resolutions. I am going to give Ken a check-plus on his resolution. He nailed it with the new search field, the more Mac-like tabs, and getting guest posts regularly on Windows and Macintosh. I’m going to give myself a check. Overall I think I made improvements in our code base, but although I did slim down a number of widgets, we added a lot of features so the code footprint did increase in our area. As for useful tips and tricks, I think I did well covering using java, organizing files, and Gui internationalization.

Have a good New Year’s and a happy and healthy 2010.

By Michael Katz

Mike is a developer on the MATLAB Mobile team. When not describing himself in the third person, biking, homebrewing, or rooting for the home team, he's busy trying to make the world a better place for programming.

13:39 UTC | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “2009 Blog Retrospective”

1. Ken Orr replied on December 28th, 2009 at 22:16 UTC :
   

   I’m going to give you a check plus Mike! Your post on the editorservices API will prove to be invaluable once users start playing with it. This will be an exciting area — I’ll be sure to watch for more developments there!

   Keep up the great work Mike.

   -Ken

2. Naor replied on December 30th, 2009 at 23:14 UTC :
   

   Don’t give up on free t-shirts!

3. Yoshiki replied on January 1st, 2010 at 19:42 UTC :
   

   I love free shirts specially geek shirts, I sent my screen capture for that contest but I never received a response.

   Make anoyher contest or start selling them, i would really love a MATLAB shirt.

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