2004 in Review: Looking Backward

It's been over seven years (!) since the Pick of the Week blog was started by my co-workers Scott Hirsch and Doug Hull. Scott and Doug have moved on to doing other things at MathWorks, but Jiro, Bob, and I--and our guests--stepped into their shoes to continue the selection and blogging process. Though the team has changed over the years, the files we've collectively picked are, for the most part, still available on the File Exchange. Nevertheless, we've never put together an index of what we've Picked over the years. So beginning this week, I thought I would start compiling annual indexes of the files that have earned the coveted "Pick of the Week" tag over the years. I'll start this week with 2004, and in my next several posts, I'll index the subsequent years.

Title/Author/Summary/Notes	Image
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SUPTITLE Author: N/A Place a title above subtitles in a figure (Note: File no longer available; try this one instead.)
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XTICKLABEL_ROTATE Brian Katz Rotate xticks on plots
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KEEP David Yang Keep the specified variables, clear the rest
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PRINTMATRIX Stephan Wegerich Format matrix display to user-specified decimal places
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MAKETHUMBDIR Brett Shoelson Create thumbnails for all MATLAB-writeable image types of a given extension in a selected directory
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SLICEOMATIC Eric Ludlam Volume slice visualization GUI
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SHIFT John T. McCarthy SHIFT a row or column RELATIVE to the other elements in a MATRIX
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ARTICULATED HUMANOID BODY Walterio Mayol-Cuevas Visualizes an articulated humanoid body in anatomical static posture (Note: Requires companion file nancybody.)
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FPEAK Geng Jun Detects peak values in your data
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SIMULINK ALIGNMENT TOOL Author: N/A Manage the alignment and layout of blocks in your Simulink models (Note: While this file is no longer available, much of its functionality is now provided within Simulink itself.)
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GOOGLE TOOLBOX Matthew Simoneau Interact with Google from your MATLAB desktop (Note: Author notes that Google has deprecated their API, and that there are no known workarounds. But you might try this submission instead.)
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MATLAB PROGRAMMING STYLE GUIDE Richard Johnson 13 pages of advice on writing clear code
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OCTAVE TOOLBOX Christophe Couvreur Generates normalized A-weigthing, -weighting, octave and one-third-octave digital filters
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HLINE and VLINE Brandon Kuczenski Draws 'low-impact' horizontal or vertical lines on the current axes
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USEFUL BROWSER SHORTCUTS Author: N/A A collection of useful browser links (Note: File no longer available; try this one instead.)
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M2HTML Author: N/A Automatically creates HTML documentation for MATLAB m-files and toolboxes (Note: File no longer available; try MATLAB's Publish function instead.)
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MINN Author: N/A Find the minimum value of a matrix (Note: File no longer available; try minn = min(x(:)); instead.)
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2-DIMENSIONAL HISTOGRAM Kangwon Lee Returns a matrix of number of points in each bin defined by two vectors
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MAGIC 8-BALL Scott Copeland Recreates the famous Mattel® novelty toy
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INTERACTIVE MOVIE PLAYER Author: N/A A movie player with full controls (Note: File no longer available; if you have the Image Processing Toolbox, try IMPLAY instead.)
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INSTRUMENT DRIVERS Author: N/A A note on supported instrument control drivers (Note: File no longer available; take a look at the Instrument Control Team's "Driver Page" instead, where team members have shared more than 100 drivers.)
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MAKING SURFACE PLOTS FROM SCATTER DATA Zain Mecklai A white paper that addresses how to turn a collection of XYZ triplets into a surface plot
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SPEAK Fahad Al Mahmood Uses Excel to speak entered texts or numbers
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SELECT3D, SELECT3D TOOL Joe Conti Obtains a 3-D selection point
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USING NUMERICAL COMPUTING WITH MATLAB IN THE CLASSROOM Cleve Moler A collection of demos presented in a webinar by MathWorks' Chief Scientist Cleve Moler
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RANDOM SOURCE USING THE EMBEDDED MATLAB FUNCTION BLOCK Colin Warwick A demonstration of MATLAB on an embedded processor
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GRAPH_AND_TABLE Michael Robbins Create a graph and a data table below it
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ANIMATED CONVOLUTION Michael Robbins A simple MATLAB demo to animate the process of convolution
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PLT Paul Mennen An alternative to plot and plotyy optimized for data exploration
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PLTSTMP Andreas Adds a timestamp and name of the calling script to a graph
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SUBFUNS Robert Bemis Command-line utility to list all function declarations within a specified m-file
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HATCHED FILL PATTERNS PLUS Brian Katz Modified APPLYHATCH to allow for variable resolution output for printing
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CAR PANELS GUI Michael Wunder Demonstrates how to map regions of an image to user-specified callback functionality
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GALACTIC Author: N/A Air to air combat simulation (Note: File no longer available.)
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SURFPLOT Gordon Cooper Overlays highpass filtered data ontop of data itself, in 3D
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COLORBARF Blair Greenan Adds a colorbar to your filled contour plot
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UNPLOT Toby Driscoll Removes the most recently drawn object(s)
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SAVEPPT Mark Brown Saves Matlab figure windows or Simulink models to a Powerpoint file
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BLOCKCLOCK Tim Farajian Interesting clock composed of animated blocks
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ISPR Michael Kleder Use Java to rapidly determine whether an arbitrarily large positive integer is a prime
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ORTHOGONALSLICER Laszlo Balkay Volume explorer tool by 3 orthogonal slices
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SPLASH Qun Han Adds a splash screen to your GUI
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GOTO and GOBACK Scott Hirsch Jump to the directory containing a specified file, and then jump back
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IMAQPLOT David Tarkowski Preview video data using callbacks
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QUICK, EASY MAPS Michael Kleder Two quick and easy functions to create simple map figures
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DYNAMICS OF SOME CLASSICAL SYSTEM MODELS Howard Wilson Animated response of some classical systems
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SATELLITE VIEW OF GLOBE, DAY/NIGHT Michael Kleder Idealized satellite view of earth with day/night boundary

You can read the original blog posts for each of these picks by clicking on the names of the files and following the links to the "Pick of the Week" tag. As always, your comments are welcome.

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Aurélien replied on March 4th, 2011 at 15:28 UTC :

It is a good move!

Tometheus replied on March 4th, 2011 at 16:56 UTC :

What happened to Suptitle? I’ve been using that function for over a decade now and didn’t realize it was no longer available online.

KE replied on March 4th, 2011 at 20:39 UTC :

Might want to go from most recent to oldest, and to indicate if a program has been updated, such as keep.m

Brett replied on March 4th, 2011 at 22:12 UTC :

Thanks for the comments!

@Tometheus: Suptitle was pulled from the File Exchange a while ago; I’m not sure why. Hopefully the alternative that I steered to will meet the needs of those who don’t have an old copy of Suptitle.

@KE: I considered starting with the more recent years, but decided that I wanted to revisit the older files first. I’m going to leave it up to the individual to determine if their downloaded code is the most recent. (The capacity to “watch this file” should help you keep up-to-date on changes to files of interest.)

Kate Harrison replied on March 26th, 2011 at 05:07 UTC :

M2HTML lives on at http://www.artefact.tk/software/matlab/m2html/

While I highly recommend the use of publish(), M2HTML is not quite the same. M2HTML provides a list of files in the directory plus code that is cross-linked, creates a dependency graph, and allows you to search and easily download code if you post it online. Publish() will show your code (if you choose) as well as the output which is its main advantage over M2HTML.

In short, they’re both great but they are different.

File Exchange Pick of the Week

March 4th, 2011

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