File Exchange Pick of the Week

Bob's pick this week is IconEditor v1.4 by Elmar Tarajan. This tool could improve your MATLAB workflow more than you might think. Let me explain.

If you follow the MATLAB Desktop blog you may have noticed the gallery of screenshots provided by MATLAB users. Looking through them I noticed only a few took advantage of MATLAB Desktop Shortcuts. Considering how much I rely on desktop shortcuts everyday I can only conclude that more users simply don't know about them yet. So you might check out Kristin's post and Doug's video.

One of the things I love about shortcuts is the flexibility. You can make shortcuts for just about anything. For example, I do a lot of interactive data exploration using all the constrained and unconstrained pan and zoom modes. (Note: To learn more about MATLAB's pan and zoom capabilities check out Dan's post and Doug's video.) Since I prefer toolbar buttons to menus I made shortcuts for each mode.

You can make your shortcut labels as descriptive or cryptic as you want. If your screen is not wide enough for all your shortcuts you can save space by turning off the labels. Then, when your mouse pointer hovers over an icon its label appears as a tool tip. You can also choose icons that are as unique and intuitive as you want.

How did I create those icons? That's where Elmar's IconEditor came in real handy. Those icons didn't exist anywhere to my knowledge so I just made my own, and you can too thanks to Elmar. This is a simple but useful GUI that looks very nice for starters.

Talk about workflow: the screen shot does a wonderful job of communicating how to use the tool.

The help goes on to explain the command line options for loading image data in different formats for example. For those who enjoy looking inside M-files, the last subfunction, icondata contains the data behind its own icons such as the pencil and bucket. There are more useful features to be discovered, so check it out.

How could you use this editor and custom icons? Tell us about it here.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® 7.6

<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>