MATLAB: Is there an application boilerplate available to help with starting a new GUI

app designerguideuicontrol

I'm new to developing applications within MATLAB. I have spent the last 10 years developing applications in LabVIEW and my obviously biased opinion is that it seems LabVIEW has much better support for UI development (execution structures, event handling, pixel for pixel WYSIWYG editor supporting all layout structures, etc.)
I know Mathworks is making strides with GUIDE and App Designer, but there are still stark drawbacks to both of them when compared to a full featured UI development environment. For example, GUIDE doesn't support Tab groups, and App Designer doesn't support interaction with graphs, or 3D plots. This drives me to using the fully programmatic approach, which makes layout tedious.
So my question then is: having found my way around MATLAB classes, functions, structs, etc. what are my options for developing an interactive UI, tracking mouse movements, mouse clicks, etc. Is there any boilerplate/framework that people have developed over time?
These are some examples of posts I have come across in my searches for handling mouse and axes interactions:
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/219797-check-if-mouse-is-above-an-axes
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/269093-firing-event-if-mouse-enters-graphic-objects-figure-axes-button-etc

Best Answer

You're right that GUIDE is pretty primitive compared to other development environments, especially compared to Visual Studio. That said, you can build guis with the basic things like buttons, checkboxes, etc. using GUIDE. App designer is their next generation dialog box editor and I haven't used it yet, but it can have fancier looking components. For GUIDE, I think this is the best framework for a general purpose app to get you started. It handles a lot of the things you need to do in a typical app, like display files, loop over selected files, etc. Just delete the components you don't need and add additional components if you need them, like more checkboxes or whatever.
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/24224-magic-matlab-generic-imaging-component
Description:
This GUI will help the novice user get up to speed very quickly on using GUI-based applications. Everything is laid out in a very simple Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, etc. layout. It is a very good starting point for a typical image analysis application. This application uses GUIDE to do the user interface design, and has most of the basic controls such as buttons, listboxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, scrollbars, etc. It allows the user to select a folder of images, select one or more images and display them, to select a series of options, and to individually or batch process one or more images. The user can optionally apply a mask (region of interest) to the image so that only the area within the mask will be analyzed. The results are optionally sent to Excel. In this demo, I do some very basic particle sizing but in use, the user would replace that simple demo code in the function AnalyzeSingleImage() with their own code. Works with Windows or Unix since paths are all forward slashes. Requires the Image Processing Toolbox to do the simple particle sizing demo, but if you delete that demo code before using it, then the IP toolbox would not be required and it would still demonstrate the basic GUI-based file processing functionality.
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