Practical example: Algorithm development for making colormaps

Posted by Doug Hull, November 15, 2007

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In a recent post, I mentioned LazyWeb It worked better than I expected. Matt posted some code that I requested that will highlight a line when you click on it. This works exactly as hoped. Thanks Matt, your MATLAB T-shirt has been shipped to thank you for your effort. Ned thought this was great, so he posted a request for some code that makes colormaps. I took up the challenge, mostly so that I could record how I went about developing an algorithm. I broke this into two videos: In this first video you will see:

The colormaps that we are developing from a journal article
The colormap applied to a MATLAB figure
How to call the code to make the colormap
Explaining the structure of a colormap in MATLAB
Exploring colormaps in the colormap editor
Plotting a colormap to understand its structure
Creating the colormap creating subfunction
Testing the subfunction

In this second video you will see:

We review the colormaps that are to be made.
Show the four expected calling syntaxes for the function
Show how to use VARARGIN to make deal with different numbers of input arguments
Show error catching
Show different branches of code to be followed based on inputs
Developing an algorithm with cell mode to test an algorithm
Testing
Documentation

This code was written live, so mistakes were made along the way. This gives you a realistic view of how a MATLAB expert deals with the inevitable errors that occur while programming. Other videos have been gathered here: https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/category/video/ Practical example videos have been gathered here: https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/category/practical-example