I have expanded my answer to Dani’s question into a full article ( http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-help-popup-contents) and companion utility (popupPanel – http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/25975).

Enjoy 🙂

Dani – yes: you can popup this HelpPopup window using the following:

jDesktop = com.mathworks.mde.desk.MLDesktop.getInstance;
jTextArea = jDesktop.getMainFrame.getFocusOwner;
jClassName = 'com.mathworks.mlwidgets.help.HelpPopup';
jPosition = java.awt.Rectangle(0,0,400,300);
helpTopic = 'surf';
javaMethodEDT('showHelp',jClassName,jTextArea,[],jPosition,helpTopic);

where:
1) jPosition sets popup’s pixel size and position (X,Y,Width,Height). Remember that Java counts from the top down (opposite to Matlab) and is 0-based. Therefore, Rectangle(0,0,400,300) is a 400×300 window at the screen’s top-left corner.

2) helpTopic is the help topic of your choice (the output of the doc function). To display arbitrary text, create an HTML doc page. A much easier alternative is to create a simple .m file that only has a main help comment with your arbitrary text, which will be presented in the popup.
Note: on pre-R2008a releases you need to use the equivalent but more cumbersome awtinvoke function instead of javaMethodEDT.

works great, I had to do alot of modifying of the schema and other mfiles throughout to change uitab to uitab_new, but it was well worth it.

Jason – you can replicate the entire uitab/uitabgroup code base (m-files and their associated private folders) to a network-accessible central location, which you would then be able to modify.

You’ll need to ensure that your Matlab path uses the new location rather than the default one – perhaps the best way to ensure this is to simply rename the files (and associate private folders) to uitab_new/uitabgroup_new, or something similar.

Thanks Again
Jason

@Jason – the updateVisibility function is an m-file (%matlabroot%\toolbox\matlab\uitools\@uitools\@uitab\updateVisibility.m) that is responsible for hiding the previous tab’s components and unhiding the new tab’s components, whenever the active tab is changed (selected). Each tab is considered a “child” of the tabgroup and automatically has the updateVisibility() function defined as a private function. It appears that CSHelp adds extra children that do not have this updateVisibility() function defined.

I think the simplest workaround is simply to add a try-catch block around the offending line (%matlabroot%\toolbox\matlab\uitools\@uitools\@uitabgroup\schema.m line #211 [for Matlab R2008a]):

    try
        children(i).updateVisibility();
    catch
        % never mind...
    end

Thanks for the detailed response!

??? No appropriate method or public field updateVisibility for class hg.hgjavacomponent.

Error in ==> uitools.uitabgroup.schema>onSelChanged at 211
children(i).updateVisibility();

Any Ideas?
Thanks
Jason

http://tinyurl.com/mt2ncl
http://tinyurl.com/nls6r4

The classes mentioned in the first post are using the schema.m mechanism.

Thanks for your help,
Ashish.