What features and improvements do you hope to see in HG2?

For a long time now, MATLABers have been calling for an improved graphics pipeline. MathWorks have made it clear in the past few years that they are working on such an improvement, which has been codenamed HG2. It may or may not even appear in the next MATLAB release*. When it does arrive, I think it's worth measuring it against the things people have been asking for.

So my question is:

What improvements over the current graphics pipeline would you like to see in HG2?

Please put one improvement per answer, and vote for improvements you also want to see.

*Those of you who have seen the Release Notes for R2014b will already know whether HG2 will make its debut in it. Given the terms of using the prerelease, I couldn't possibly comment.

[Sean de Wolski]

Now that R2014b is out, quite a few of these have been implemented :)

Answer 1

[Oliver Woodford]

Set a colormap per axes instead of per figure. This would make it much simpler to use multiple colormaps in the same figure.

[Oliver Woodford]

This has been done in R2014b.

Answer 2

[Oliver Woodford]

Anti-aliased graphics.

[Oliver Woodford]

This has been done in R2014b.

Answer 3

[Oliver Woodford]

MUCH faster rendering.

For example, MATLAB renders a million points of different colors incredibly slowly. I reckon some well written OpenGL code could perform such an operation 1000-10000x faster. Really.

[Oliver Woodford]

Some stuff is a bit faster, but it's not amazing.

Answer 4

[Oliver Woodford]

Support for all fonts, not a limited subset, in vector graphics export.

Answer 5

[Robert Cumming]

Better 3d rotation (smoother, faster and more like CAD packages rotation)

[Oliver Woodford]

See fcw for something more like CAD packages.

Answer 6

[Robert Cumming]

more consistency across function calls (i.e. in plot you can do:

plot ( axHandle, X, Y, etc.... )

but in text you have to do:

text ( X, Y, 'string', 'parent', axHandle )

[Jan]

I'd suggest:

plot ( X, Y, 'Parent', axHandle )

Notice that the "smart" form will lead to ambiguities under some circumstances:

plot(X, Y)

If X is scalar and the value of an axes handle, you cannot draw this point. Fortunately handles are not doubles anymore in R2014b.

Answer 7

[Oliver Woodford]

Support for transparency and lighting in vector graphics export.

Answer 8

[Robert Cumming]

make legend location more intelligent and not on top of the data ;).

Answer 9

[Robert Cumming]

have CData property in all uicontrols

Answer 10

[Robert Cumming]

html support in all uicontrols

Answer 11

[Robert Cumming]

when you have a long time series (minutes) with high frequency data (milli-seconds) datetick doesn't work well when you zoom in - the ticks dissappear and it will only let you zoom in so far...

Answer 12

[Robert Cumming]

when value goes out of range (listbox) don't hide the control - set the listbox selection to [] (i.e. nothing selected)

Answer 13

[Robert Cumming]

Ability to select nothing (i.e. set to []) from a listbox.

Answer 14

[Robert Cumming]

Turning on 3d rotation doesn't remove buttonDownFcn callback from other controls

Answer 15

[Robert Cumming]

much faster generation of legends

Answer 16

[Oliver Woodford]

Some volume rendering capabilities, similar to voreen.

Answer 17

[Jan]

I'm waiting for powerful UITREE and UITABLE implementations.

Answer 18

[Oliver Woodford]

Texture mapping of arbitrary meshes. See this question.