Learning to Program with MATLAB: Building GUI Tools

9.1    Getting started with GUIDE

9.2    Starting an action with a GUI element

9.3    Communicating with GUI elements

9.4    Synchronizing information with a GUI element

9.5    Key points from this chapter

The graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE) enables the rapid creation of a graphical user interface (GUI) for a MATLAB program. In this chapter we will introduce the GUIDE program and describe how to use it in basic GUI deployment. GUIDE is used to build the GUI, which can then be connected to a program, through a process we will describe in the next chapter. The GUI is contained in two files, a figure file with the suffix .fig, which contains graphical layout information, and an m-file with suffix .m, which contains the main GUI function and a number of subfunctions. This latter file is written in template form by GUIDE, and can be edited to add functionality and connect with other functions.

This chapter and the chapter that follows are very tutorial. Much of the information to be conveyed is visual and procedural. The goal is to provide a fairly complete and detailed explanation of the process of GUI creation. A perhaps unfortunate side-effect of this level of detail is that it can leave the reader with the impression that the process is more complex than it is in reality. It actually is not that hard; just a few concepts and processes suffice.

9.1   Getting ...