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cui,xingxing
Last activity on 15 Feb 2025 at 13:54

What interesting things can you do with the “MATLAB Central Interface for MATLAB"?

Since May 2023, MathWorks officially introduced the new Community API(MATLAB Central Interface for MATLAB), which supports both MATLAB and Node.js languages, allowing users to programmatically access data from MATLAB Answers, File Exchange, Blogs, Cody, Highlights, and Contests.

I’m curious about what interesting things people generally do with this API. Could you share some of your successful or interesting experiences? For example, retrieving popular Q&A topics within a certain time frame through the API and displaying them in a chart.

If you have any specific examples or ideas in mind, feel free to share!

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 8 Feb 2025 at 9:20

It's time to support Markdown syntax in MATLAB FEX

MATLAB FEX(MATLAB File Exchange) should support Markdown syntax for writing. In recent years, many open-source community documentation platforms, such as GitHub, have generally supported Markdown. MATLAB is also gradually improving its support for Markdown syntax. However, when directly uploading files to the MATLAB FEX community and preparing to write an overview, the outdated document format buttons are still present. Even when directly uploading a Markdown document, it cannot be rendered. We hope the community can support Markdown syntax!

BTW，I know that open-source Markdown writing on GitHub and linking to MATLAB FEX is feasible, but this is a workaround. It would be even better if direct native support were available.

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 27 Jan 2025

The "DisplayName" option for the plot function Should support string array input

Currently, according to the official documentation, "DisplayName" only supports character vectors or single scalar string as input. For example, when plotting three variables simultaneously, if I use a single scalar string as input, the legend labels will all be the same. To have different labels, I need to specify them separately using the legend function with label1, label2, label3.

Here's an example illustrating the issue:

x = (1:10)';

y1 = x;

y2 = x.^2;

y3 = x.^3;

% Plotting with a string scalar for DisplayName

figure;

plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName="y = x");

legend;

% To have different labels, I need to use the legend function separately

figure;

plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName=["y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3"]);

Error using plot
Value must be a character vector or a string scalar.

% legend("y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3");

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 11 Dec 2024

MATLAB is looking forward to having an intelligent AI programming assistant similar to GitHub Copilot

In the past two years, large language models have brought us significant changes, leading to the emergence of programming tools such as GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Kite, CodeGPT, Replit, Cursor, and many others. Most of these tools support code writing by providing auto-completion, prompts, and suggestions, and they can be easily integrated with various IDEs.

As far as I know, aside from the MATLAB-VSCode/MatGPT plugin, MATLAB lacks such AI assistant plugins for its native MATLAB-Desktop, although it can leverage other third-party plugins for intelligent programming assistance. There is hope for a native tool of this kind to be built-in.

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 29 Jan 2025

Number of deep learning toolbox updates

What is the side-effect of counting the number of Deep Learning Toolbox™ updates in the last 5 years? The industry has slowly stabilised and matured, so updates have slowed down in the last 1 year, and there has been no exponential growth.Is it correct to assume that? Let's see what you think!

releaseNumNames = "R"+string(2019:2024)+["a";"b"];

releaseNumNames = releaseNumNames(:);

numReleaseNotes = [10,14,27,39,38,43,53,52,55,57,46,46];

exampleNums = [nan,nan,nan,nan,nan,nan,40,24,22,31,24,38];

bar(releaseNumNames,[numReleaseNotes;exampleNums]')

legend(["#release notes","#new/update examples"],Location="northwest")

title("Number of Deep Learning Toolbox™ update items in the last 5 years")

ylabel("#release notes")

Tips & Tricks

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 2 Oct 2024

An efficient way to create struct arrays

Create a struct arrays where each struct has field names "a," "b," and "c," which store different types of data. What efficient methods do you have to assign values from individual variables "a," "b," and "c" to each struct element? Here are five methods I've provided, listed in order of decreasing efficiency. What do you think?

Create an array of 10,000 structures, each containing each of the elements corresponding to the a,b,c variables.

num = 10000;
a = (1:num)';
b = string(a);
c = rand(3,3,num);

Here are the methods;

%% method1

t1 =tic;

s = struct("a",[], ...

"b",[], ...

"c",[]);

s1 = repmat(s,num,1);

for i = 1:num

s1(i).a = a(i);

s1(i).b = b(i);

s1(i).c = c(:,:,i);

end

t1 = toc(t1);

%% method2

t2 =tic;

for i = num:-1:1

s2(i).a = a(i);

s2(i).b = b(i);

s2(i).c = c(:,:,i);

end

t2 = toc(t2);

%% method3

t3 =tic;

for i = 1:num

s3(i).a = a(i);

s3(i).b = b(i);

s3(i).c = c(:,:,i);

end

t3 = toc(t3);

%% method4

t4 =tic;

ct = permute(c,[3,2,1]);

t = table(a,b,ct);

s4 = table2struct(t);

t4 = toc(t4);

%% method5

t5 =tic;

s5 = struct("a",num2cell(a),...

"b",num2cell(b),...

"c",squeeze(mat2cell(c,3,3,ones(num,1))));

t5 = toc(t5);

%% plot

bar([t1,t2,t3,t4,t5])

xtickformat('method %g')

ylabel("time(second)")

yline(mean([t1,t2,t3,t4,t5]))

MATLAB online documentation redirection is very time-consuming - MATLAB Answers - MATLAB Central

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 13 Dec 2024

(Document redirection) Online documents do not remind you to select your geographic destination every time you reopen them

As far as I know, starting from MATLAB R2024b, the documentation is defaulted to be accessed online. However, the problem is that every time I open the official online documentation through my browser, it defaults or forcibly redirects to the documentation hosted site for my current geographic location, often with multiple pop-up reminders, which is very annoying!

Suggestion: Could there be an option to set preferences linked to my personal account so that the documentation defaults to my chosen language preference without having to deal with “forced reminders” or “forced redirection” based on my geographic location? I prefer reading the English documentation, but the website automatically redirects me to the Chinese documentation due to my geolocation, which is quite frustrating!

----------------2024.12.13 update-----------------

Although the above issue was resolved by technical support, subsequent redirects are still causing severe delays...

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 28 Sep 2024

(Enhancement Request)"vision.VideoPlayer/VideoViewer" should be presented as a more modern player

In the past two years, MATHWORKS has updated the image viewer and audio viewer, giving them a more modern interface with features like play, pause, fast forward, and some interactive tools that are more commonly found in typical third-party players. However, the video player has not seen any updates. For instance, the Video Viewer or vision.VideoPlayer could benefit from a more modern player interface. Perhaps I haven't found a suitable built-in player yet. It would be great if there were support for custom image processing and audio processing algorithms that could be played in a more modern interface in real time.

Additionally, I found it quite challenging to develop a modern video player from scratch in App Designer.（If there's a video component for that that would be great）

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BTW，the following picture shows the built-in function uihtml function showing a more modern playback interface with controls for play, pause and so on. But can not add real-time image processing algorithms within it.

cui,xingxing
Last activity on 23 Apr 2024

Is there a position for Matlab Community remote support work?

As far as I know, the MATLAB Community (including Matlab Central and Mathworks' official GitHub repository) has always been a vibrant and diverse professional and amateur community of MATLAB users from various fields globally. Being a part of it myself, especially in recent years, I have not only benefited continuously from the community but also tried to give back by helping other users in need.

I am a senior MATLAB user from Shenzhen, China, and I have a deep passion for MATLAB, applying it in various scenarios. Due to the less than ideal job market in my current social environment, I am hoping to find a position for remote support work within the Matlab Community. I wonder if this is realistic. For instance, Mathworks has been open-sourcing many repositories in recent years, especially in the field of deep learning with typical applications across industries. I am eager to use the latest MATLAB features to implement state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, I occasionally contribute through GitHub issues and pull requests.

In conclusion, I am looking forward to the opportunity to formally join the Matlab Community in a remote support role, dedicating more energy to giving back to the community and making the world a better place! (If a Mathworks employer can contact me, all the better~)