SIMULINK and GUIs - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users - page 127

Figure8-7: ScopeOutputfortheInhomogeneous
Equation.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)

WithMATLAB you can create your own Graphical User Interface , or GUI,
which consists of a Figure window containing menus, buttons, text, graphics,
etc., that a user can manipulate interactively with the mouse and keyboard.
There are two main steps in creating a GUI: One is designing its layout, and
the other is writing callback functions that perform the desired operations
when the user selects different features.

GUI Layout and GUIDE
Specifying the location and properties of different objects in a GUI can be done
withcommands suchas uicontrol , uimenu , and uicontextmenu in an M-
file. MATLAB also provides an interactive tool (a GUI itself !) called GUIDE
that greatly simplifies the task of building a GUI. We will describe here how
to get started writing GUIs with the MATLAB 6 version of GUIDE, which has
been significantly enhanced over previous versions.

One possible drawback of GUIDE is that it equips your GUI with commands
that are new in MATLAB 6 and it saves the layout of the GUI in a binary
.i file. If your goal is to create a robust GUI that many different users can