The ribbon
The ribbon contains a collection of basic MATLAB processes and resides in the top part of the environment window. It is based on the latest Graphical User Interface trends, like the ones used in Microsoft Office software products since the 2007 version. It has three main tabs:
- HOME
- PLOTS
- APPS
These three tabs are briefly described in the following sections.
The HOME tab
The HOME tab contains the most basic and generic processes used in MATLAB. In this book, we will only need some of them.
As we can see in the previous image, there are six main groups of processes present on the HOME tab; FILE, VARIABLE, CODE, SIMULINK, ENVIRONMENT, and RESOURCES.
From these six groups, we will certainly need the FILE group processes to create or open MATLAB files. The VARIABLE group is a new addition in MATLAB 2012b, providing an intuitive, yet unnecessary way for variable creation. The group named CODE is useful for code analysis, the SIMULINK group is used for a tool that is not covered in this book, the ENVIRONMENT group is a way to tweak the setting of the MATLAB environment, and finally, RESOURCES are processes for getting online and offline help.
The PLOTS tab
The PLOTS tab is a tool that helps you plot variables. Besides traditional plotting capabilities (for example, creating a graph from x and y coordinates), it can also be used as an alternative way to show images stored in variables or even to play videos stored in variables.
The APPS tab
The APPS tab is also a rather new addition and provides a quick way to access basic MATLAB tools by clicking on their icons, rather than writing their name in the command line. We can use it to quickly access the Image Acquisition or the Image Viewer tools, which are useful for digital media processing.
