I started this blog three years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors, shortly followed by an article on my cprintf utility, which to this day is still the most popular article on this website. cprintf is also one of my top-downloaded utilities, second only to findjobj, and closely followed by officedoc and uiinspect.

In 2011, I published 47 articles, including:

• Donn Shull’s series on UDD
• a few posts about integrating 3rd-party Java libraries in Matlab (JFreeChart, JGraph, JBoost)
• a mini-series about things that can be done to figure windows (minimization/maximization, disabling, transparency, blurring, docking)
• some articles about internal built-in Matlab GUI controls (plot-selection, color-selection, tri-state checkbox)
• a few posts dealing with performance, which is one of my favorite topics
• quite a few articles about miscellaneous undocumented Matlab topics, ranging from GUI (uitable sorting, multi-line tooltips), graphics (plot data-tips, axes zoom), I/O (reading non-Latin files, formatting numbers), external interfaces (running VB code), etc.
• last but certainly not least, posts related to my work over the past six years – my book about Matlab-Java programming

Hopefully there was enough material and diversity in there to satisfy different audiences. Judging by the traffic on the site, this appears to be the case indeed. Interest in this website still grows steadily, continuing the trend from the first two years. To date, 164,000 unique readers have read at least one article here (two on average), in over 300,000 different visits – more than doubling the figures from last year. In fact, the lowest traffic point of the year, which is customarily around Christmas/New-Year, has had about the same level of traffic this year as the highest-traffic weeks of 2010 (the other dip you see in 2011 is due to a week-long site-overhaul in March):

Steady readership growth (click for details)

RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace. I’m quite proud of the fact that there are more readers/subscribers to this blog than any other Matlab-related blog, excluding perhaps Loren’s. Having felt the pressure and difficulty in writing a fresh weekly post for the past three years, I truly admire Loren’s six years of continuous high-quality blogging.

The top countries from which you readers visit this site remains unchanged from last year’s post. So this year I will show a different angle, of the top cities visiting in 2011: Munich, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, New York, Paris, Bangalore, Berlin, Zurich and Toronto.

Natick (MA, USA), home of the MathWorks HQ and some 30,000 other inhabitants, has dropped to 12th place in 2011, although it still maintains the #3 position in all-time visits (since this blog was started). Apparently, as this website gets wider recognition by Matlab users, the relative percentage of MathWorkers interested in this blog decreases, although in absolute numbers I can see that MathWorks visits have remained more-or-less constant.

Readers from all over the world (click for details)

In 2012 I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include the much-overdue articles on uiinspect and its close relative checkClass, as well as additional articles on internal built-in controls. I hope to cross out many items in my TODO list.

There will also be more articles by guest bloggers – I have a growing list of such guest bloggers, of which I am extremely pleased, and some of the promised articles are very interesting. I encourage anyone who has an idea for an article to contact me by email (altmany at gmail, or use the link at the top-right of this page).

Happy 2012 everybody!

- Yair Altman

1. 2010 perspective & plans for 2011 2009 and 2010 have seen steady growth in readership of this website. This post takes an overview of past achievements and future plans....
2. Ideas for a new book With my Matlab-Java book being published, reader feedback is requested about the next book project. ...
3. About This Blog is the fruit of passion. In close to 20 years of programming in a multitude of different programming languages and environments, I have found Matlab to be second...
4. BlinkDagger – the end? In his latest post on BlinkDagger, Quan Quach announced that the BlinkDagger blog will be frozen following co-author Daniel Sutoyo’s hiring by The MathWorks and the continuous strain of maintaining...

If you are one of those who have received the book, please be kind enough to write a review of it, in book sites such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

As promised, I will maintain the book’s webpage with an errata list and possibly more information, as they become available.

The question of a new book

As with any birth, the initial exhilaration completely overwhelms, letting me forget how hard it has been to write the book. So while this “high” lasts, I wanted to ask you my readers for your opinion regarding a possible future book.

Which of the following books by me, possibly co-authored with another writer, would you be interested to read and/or have in your library?

1. Professional Matlab application development
2. Professional Matlab GUI
3. Matlab performance tuning
4. Undocumented Matlab – the non-Java parts
5. Some other subject (please specify)
6. None of the above

Please choose only a single item, or prioritize your choices. It will be a book about only one of the above topics, not several topics. I’m not going to write another 700-page monster that takes 5 years to prepare…

There are of course many factors going into a decision about whether or not to enter a book-writing project. It is a multi-year commitment that requires lots of effort, time, focus, and attention to detail. It affects the writer in a way that influences the entire family. In fact, my wife has already voted an emphatic “NO!” on this subject, and I’m pretty ambivalent about this issue myself.

Please do let me know what you think in a short comment. Happy Holidays everyone!

1. Matlab-Java book Undocumented Secrets of Matlab-Java Programming (ISBN 9781439869031) is a book dedicated to the integration of Matlab and Java. ...
2. Matlab-Java book Quick links:     Table of Contents     Book organization     FAQ     About the author     Errata list For a variety of reasons, the Matlab-Java interface was never fully documented....
3. 2011 perspective & plans for 2012 2011 has seen a continued steady growth in readership of this website. This post takes an overview of past achievements and future plans. ...
4. About This Blog is the fruit of passion. In close to 20 years of programming in a multitude of different programming languages and environments, I have found Matlab to be second...

This website was started two years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors. In that article and a few that followed I showed how we can use undocumented Matlab features and functions to achieve stuff that nobody thought were possible. That starting article, with its cprintf followup are still some of the most popular articles on this website to this day.

Interest in this website grew steadily, from several hundred weekly visitors at the beginning, to thousands of unique weekly readers today. To date, 77,000 unique readers have read at least one article here, in some 140,000 different visits. RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace, with about a thousand subscribers today.

Steady readership growth (click for details)

The top visit-origin countries were the United States (quite a few of them from MathWorks headquarters itself), Germany, UK, France, India, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Australia.

Surprisingly, US visitors only account for about a third of all visits to the website. Apparently Matlab’s use worldwide is more evenly-spread than one would have assumed from the US’s technological dominance. Altogether, readers came from 163 different countries all over the world, including some that surprised me – for example, I did not expect an active Matlab community in Egypt or Vietnam, which came in at #36 and #45 respectively.

Readers from all over the world (click for details)

For the past two years, I have published weekly articles on this website. I have invested many hours of research, testing and preparation of each and every article. Many additional hours were spent answering hundreds of queries that came in as reader comments or emails.

Unfortunately, the financial income from this website has been nearly non-existent. Apparently almost nobody noticed the “Donate” button or the “Hire me” link (many thanks to the few who did).

I plan to continue publishing, but I can no longer justify a weekly article. I will publish at a more leisurely pace from now on, probably once every two weeks or so.

My planned articles for the upcoming weeks include a series of articles about UDD objects by Donn Shull, R2011a (as far as can be done without violating the pre-release NDA), uiinspect, and several additional series on uitable, menu-bar customizations and JIDE components. Additional topics can be found on my TODO page.

Happy 2011 everybody!

- Yair Altman

1. 2011 perspective & plans for 2012 2011 has seen a continued steady growth in readership of this website. This post takes an overview of past achievements and future plans. ...
2. Customizing Matlab labels Matlab's text uicontrol is not very customizable, and does not support HTML or Tex formatting. This article shows how to display HTML labels in Matlab and some undocumented customizations...
3. Customizing uicontrol border Matlab uicontrol borders can easily be modified - this article shows how...
4. IB-Matlab IB-Matlab is a commercial application that connects Matlab with Interactive-Brokers (IB). IB-Matlab provides a Matlab wrapper interface to IB’s API Java connector. This enables quantitative traders and algo traders to...

This is sad news indeed for the Matlab user community. Over the past few years, BlinkDagger has become the largest independent Matlab-related blog (at least that I know of), with some 150 well-written tutorials on a very wide variety of Matlab-related topics. In fact, I believe that only the official Matlab blogs and the Matlab CSSM forum contain more Matlab content. Although there are reportedly over a million Matlab users worldwide, there is precious little independent online Matlab content. Perhaps the need is answered by CSSM and the official blogs, and perhaps the reason is other. In any case, BlinkDagger’s retirement will be well-felt.

As a novice (4-month) blogger I can well appreciate the effort it took Quan and Daniel to write so much well-crafted content, follow-up on numerous comments and continuously think of interesting article ideas. The fact they have succeeded in doing so consistently for so long, without noticeable quality degradation, is remarkable. So, while regretting their action, I can certainly understand it. I truly wish both Quan and Daniel the best of luck in their new adventures, and send them an enormous hug of gratitude for their services to the Matlab community.

Don’t be lazy – be a sport – visit the BlinkDagger link and tell Quan and Daniel that you too appreciate their efforts. Let them leave the stage with a standing ovation rather than a whimper. They deserve it.

Yair Altman

1. Spicing up Matlab uicontrol tooltips Matlab uicontrol tooltips can be spiced-up using HTML and CSS, including fonts, colors, tables and images...
2. HTML support in Matlab uicomponents Matlab uicomponents support HTML and CSS, enabling colored items, superscript/subscript, fonts, bold/italic/underline and many other modifications...
3. 2011 perspective & plans for 2012 2011 has seen a continued steady growth in readership of this website. This post takes an overview of past achievements and future plans. ...
4. Ideas for a new book With my Matlab-Java book being published, reader feedback is requested about the next book project. ...