VersionBay

On the 17th of September 2020, MATLAB R2020b was released. There are countless new features and 5 new products from MathWorks:

• Deep Learning HDL Toolbox – Prototype and deploy deep learning networks on FPGAs and SoCs
• Lidar Toolbox – Design, analyze, and test lidar processing systems
• RoadRunner Scene Builder – Automatically generate 3D road models from HD maps
• UAV Toolbox – Design, simulate, and deploy UAV applications

This article will go over VersionBay’s favorite features in MATLAB and Simulink.

To make this entry as useful as possible VersionBay nominated 4 features for each of the following groups of MATLAB users: Newbies, Casual Users, Proficient Users and Developers.

• Newbies: people who are just starting to use MATLAB.
• Casual Users: they use MATLAB every now and again.
• Proficient Users: people who use MATLAB on a regular basis, e.g. at least 3 times per week.
• Developers: they use MATLAB to develop tools on top of MATLAB to make the organization/community more productive.

Top features for Newbies

• bubblechart and bubblechart3 are two new charts
• The new Colormap Editor just looks more modern and easier to use
• plot has 2 new markers _ and |
• Live Editor enables resizing images

Top features for Casual Users

• There are several new Live Tasks:
  • Add web camera image interactively
  • Optimize helps solve optimization problems interactively
  • Clean Outlier Data in an interactive way
• readstruct and writestruct to read and write data stored in XML
• Customize formatting when writing data to spreadsheet files with PreserveFormat and AutoFitWidth

Top features for Proficient Users

• pattern and extract are a neat alternative to regular expressions
• Export all of the live scripts and live functions in a folder to a standard format
• groupsummary  now accepts anonymous functions
• uitable adjusts automatically column width based on data

Top features for Developers

• Compare and Merge Apps facilitates using the App Designer in production
• Perform drag gestures on axes and UI axes
• matlabRelease is more elegant than ver or version
• Several new argument validators:
  • mustBeA Validate that value comes from one of the specified classes
  • mustBeNonmissing Validate that value is not missing 
  • mustBeFloat Validate that value is a floating-point array
  • mustBeScalarOrEmpty Validate that value is scalar or empty
  • mustBeVector Validate that value is a vector
  • mustBeInRange Validate that value is in the specified range
  • mustBeFile Validate that path refers to file
  • mustBeFolder Validate that the input path refers to folder
  • mustBeValidVariableName Validate that the input name is a valid variable name
  • mustBeText Validate that value is a string array, character vector, or cell array of character vectors
  • mustBeTextScalar Validate that value is a single piece of text
  • mustBeNonzeroLengthText Validate that value is a string array, character vector, or cell array of character vectors that have non-zero length

If you would like to see a few more tips and tricks with MATLAB check out VersionBay Videos.