Re: GUI Octave

[Philip Nienhuis]

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
> On 9 February 2011 14:45, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I just found this site: https://sites.google.com/site/guioctave/
> 
> Wow.... yet another one.
> 

The web site seems to date from Feb 9, 2011. Hot news....



>> Does anyone here know anything about this project?  It claims to be
>> "totally free" but I don't see any links to source or licensing terms.
>> The only download seems to be a Windows .exe file.
> 
> Those screenshots look nice. I wonder if the thing actually works.
> 

Yep it does, quite nice. 

It is comparable to QtOctave, but I even might like GUI Octave better.
(What I don't like about QtOctave is the real screen estate seized by
big-button toolbars above every subwindow, and especially the fact that it
has just an input line. GUI Octave does show the plain Octave terminal.)

Like QtOctave, it has to "connect" to Octave. Does that point to pipes,
Jordi? 

The editor makes me think of Notepad++.
It's not too bad, though. Fairly good, actually.

GUI Octave also has a very decent installer (which silently adds a shortcut
to the Quick Launch toolbar and the desktop, but OK that is forgivable).


Some little glitches (using Tatsuro's 3.3.91 MingW binary stuff):

(1) After invoking 
  graphics_toolkit ('fltk')
  (as first statement, otherwise this will be ignored and Gnuplot will still
be used - a glitch in 3.3.91MingW)
  and trying some simple plots like plot (randn (10, 2)), the graphics
window never shows up.

(2) It crashed Octave miserably when I tried a script producing 34 plot
figures using fltk. May be (hmmm... probably) related to (1).

(3) It has a nice variable browser for inspecting e.g., matrices in a pop-up
window, but it doesn't get updated when you change a value in the matrix in
the Octave prompt. Similarly it cannot be used (yet?) for editing values. (I
think Matlab's variable editor can, I'll have to try at work tomorrow).
Double clicking a struct or cell array gives a listing in the terminal,
rather than in a separate pop-up window.
In comparison, QtOctave's variable browser allows editing of at least real
matrices.

(4) The history buffer wraps around (but 3.3.91 MingW has some history
issues).

(5) The Help browser is web-based (i.e., one needs Internet access) but it
didn't manage to properly connect "to the cloud".

(6) The "Check for updates" option is enabled by default - typical for
Windows software. My firewall (ZoneAlarm) catched this attempt during
installation. Perhaps that's why the Help didn't work later on.


In conclusion, after a 20 min try-out I suppose it's looks good enough to
significantly -and hopefully sufficiently- lower the treshold for the
average "point & click" Windows user to try out Octave.
In that respect, I think GUI Octave is a job well done.

But about the license.... (many Windows users don't care about that. Free =
gratis is all that counts)


BTW for those interested, there's a recent binary of QtOctave-0.10.1 for
Windows here:
  http://qtoctave.wordpress.com/download/
(works fairly good as well)


BTW would it be good to cross-post this to help-octave? I don't know how to
do this using Nabble....


Philip


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