File Exchange Pick of the Week

August 22nd, 2008

Stopwatch

Bob's pick this week is Stopwatch by Joseph Kirk.

For starters this is a useful tool. Sometimes you just want to time a real world event. Who knows where Coach Jones went but MATLAB is right there on your PC. Grab stopwatch off the File Exchange and see just how long it takes that vibration to fizzle (or how fast Cindy can chug that espresso).

Stopwatch is easy to use. It offers some nice features like time offset so it doubles as a count-down timer. The help includes lots of examples which is always a good thing.

The code metrics for this submission caught my eye. Top marks on all but cyclomatic complexity. Not bad at all.

Now look at all the reviews. Note that the first comment is on the bottom and the latest is on top. Then look at the change history (bottom of submission page). Joe used feedback from others to make his submission better. What a great example of social computing. Keep it up, Joe!

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Published with MATLAB® 7.6

By Robert Bemis

08:05 UTC | Posted in Picks | Permalink |

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One Response to “Stopwatch”

  1. Markus replied on September 14th, 2008 at 12:28 UTC :

    Regarding the code metrics:

    1. I think the cyclomatic complexity does not tell anything about how good and useful an entry is.

    2. The code metrics are still often displayed wrong. Check out this example:

    Here is seems that four of the five metrics are very low:

    http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=18593&objectType=file

    However, in three of those four categories, the submisson gets the best values possible (0.0 M-Lint messages, 0.0 filename clashes and 0.0 cloned code):

    http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=18593&objectType=scoreDetails

    Maybe one could check the computation of the green bar visualization.

    Yours
    Markus

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