MATLAB: Is there a layout manager for making Matlab GUI’s

fexmatlab gui

I normally use GUIDE to make matlab GUI.
If I want to make GUI myself without GUIDE, and layout the controls and the axis on the figure area, I really do not want to sit down and count pixels myself to determine where to put each control.
Is there a layoyt manager one can use to help in the layout of the controls, similar to Java's layout manager http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/using.html.
Otherwise, will just continue to use GUIDE.
btw, I know about http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/27758-gui-layout-toolbox I was not sure since it is not part of Matlab itself, if I spend time to learn it and write something using it, my code will not work in the next version of Matlab.
I see that the name Mathworks is on the above toolbox files. Does this mean one can depend on this code being there all the time with some update to it for future versions of Matlab? And why isn't this toolbox part of Matlab itself since it seems to have been written by Mathworks. I'd like to know this before I spend time learning something new.
thanks,

Best Answer

Well, it took a while for me to remember how to search my previous answers for this but you can use guide in a semi-automatic fashion.
Layout the GUI as desired and save it somewhere. Then in one of the callbacks (usually in a button) put a breakpoint (i use disp('debug')) and save the handles structure. Then open up the handles structure and you can write a loop to extract the positions or any other param.
  1. save handles using save('handles.mat','-struct','handles')
  2. exit existing gui and clear all variables.
  3. load handles.mat
  4. listofuiobjects = who;
  5. fid = fopen('textfile.txt')
  6. write for loop to get(listofuiobjects(i).Position) and style and other param.
  7. uitext = [''uicontrol('Style',' retreivedStyle ','Units','pixels','Position', ' retreivedPosition ' ,'Enable','off'))'] %this is air coding (saw term in another post here and liked it-similar to air guitar) so don't hold it against me if the string concatenation is wrong.
  8. fprintf uitext within the above forloop.
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