MATLAB Release Notes

Creating Graphical User Interfaces - Features

New Graphical User Interface Development Environment

GUIDE, the MATLAB graphical user interface development environment has been redesigned since MATLAB 5.3. The GUIDE toolset for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs), or visual interfaces, consists of

• Layout Editor - add and arrange objects in the figure window.
• Alignment Tool - align objects with respect to each other.
• Property Inspector - inspect and set property values.
• Object Browser - observe a hierarchical list of the Handle Graphics objects in the current MATLAB session.
• Menu Editor - create window menus and context menus.

You access all of these tools from the Layout Editor. To start the Layout Editor, use the guide command.

New Code Architecture

GUIDE now employs a FIG-file to save layout information separately from the M-file that programs the GUI. This approach has several advantages:

• Faster GUI loading
• Generated code provides the framework for application M-files with application options to include a number of useful GUI programming techniques, including:
• Cross-platform compatibility with respect to GUI figure size, screen location, colors, and fonts
• Access to object handles without saving global variables or using findobj
• Single or multiple instances of GUI
• Function prototypes for callback routines
• GUI switchyard approach to the application program

See Creating Graphical User Interfaces in the MATLAB documentation for more information.

External Interfaces/API Features

Major Bug Fixes