When the new releases come out, I like to peruse the release notes for MATLAB. Loren and the Desktop team have already started writing about the new features in their blogs, but I thought I'd mention a few items that particularly caught my eye.

First of all, the new object-oriented programming features in MATLAB are huge. Key features include:

• Class definition files, enabling definition of properties, methods, and events
• Handle classes with reference behavior, aiding the creation of data structures such as linked lists
• Events and listeners, allowing the monitoring of object property changes and actions
• JIT-Accelerator support, providing significantly improved object performance
• Development environment support for the creation and use of classes

This page contains links to documentation, a tutorial video, and an upcoming webinar.

The MATLAB Desktop has received several very useful enhancements. I particularly like the improved code folding in the MATLAB Editor, as well support for inspecting object properties in the Variable Editor. Here's a short video demonstration of the new Desktop features.

Since I frequently use the publish feature to create my blog posts from MATLAB scripts, I appreciate the new ability to create publish configurations for each of my scripts. Also, now you can define cells and capture output from within a for-loop.

If you want to experiment with different compiler settings for the FFTW library that MATLAB uses, you can now replace the FFTW shared objects with your own. (Warning—this is not for the faint of heart. You can crash MATLAB hard if you make a mistake in replacing its core libraries.)

A long-standing user request has finally been implemented; use the clearvars function to clear all variable except the ones you specify.

Finally, on Windows platforms MATLAB can give you some insight into the current status of overall memory usage on your computer with the memory function.

I've made no attempt here to provide a comprehensive summary of the new MATLAB features. As I said earlier, these are just some of the things that caught my eye. I encourage you to look at the release notes yourself to discover your own gems in the new release.