GUITool is a cross compatible Graphical User Interface (GUI) Toolkit, UI design, and layout framework for MATLAB. It has been specifically designed to be very easy to use and allow rapid prototyping of custom MATLAB UI interfaces. At the same time it has been developed to be faster and have better performance for complex and larger scale GUIs than the Mathworks GUI Layout Toolbox.
GUITool is for example used for designing and building the simulation interfaces for the FEATool Multiphysics and CFDTool simulation toolboxes.
The GUITool framework has been compared to the Mathworks GUI Layout Toolbox (GLT) by running the included test suite, as for example
runTestSuite( 'nruns', 100, 'pause', 0, 'closef', 1, 'uilib', 'uitk' )
substituting the uilib parameter with uitk, uiextras, and uix
correspondingly. The resulting timings can be seen in the table
below. First, we can see that GUITool is 1.8-2.5 times faster than the
GUI Layout Toolbox (GLT), moreover, comparing the runs for MATLAB
2011a with 2019a it also clear that the MATLAB GUI functionality is
currently 2-3 times slower with is also consistent with a previous
MATLAB GUI benchmark comparison.
To really get good GUI performance we can therefore only recommend
using the GUITool framework with older MATLAB versions.
| MATLAB | R2011a | R2019a | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test case | GUITool | GLT (v1.17) | GUITool | GLT (v2.3.4) |
| hbox 1 | 0.5 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.9 |
| hbox 2 | 0.7 | 1.7 | 2.0 | 2.8 |
| vbox 1 | 0.4 | 1.3 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
| vbox 2 | 0.6 | 1.7 | 2.0 | 2.5 |
| grid 1 | 0.6 | 2.4 | 2.0 | 3.6 |
| boxpanel 1 | 0.5 | 2.7 | 2.2 | 12.5 |
| tabpanel 1 | 1.6 | 3.1 | 6.1 | 3.9 |
| Total Time | 5.8 | 14.2 | 16.9 | 28.9 |
Copy and add the GUI toolkit source files (.m and .p files from
the src directory) to your own project directory, or add a path to
to the directory with the addpath command.
Look at the examples in the source files uitkHBox, uitkVBox, uitkGrid, uitkBoxPanel, and uitkTabPanel as well as the examples in the src/tests directory.
Run the runTestSuite function from the root directory.
Open the included index.html file in a web browser to access the function documentation.
Copyright (C) 2013-2019 Precise Simulation Ltd.
Keywords: MATLAB GUI Layout Toolkit Framework
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