progressbar

Simple, efficient, and user friendly replacement for waitbar.

Description

This implementation of progressbar is intended to be extremely simple to use while providing a high quality user experience.

Features:
  - Can add progressbar to existing m-files with a single line of code.
  - Supports multiple bars in one figure to show progress of nested loops.
  - Optional labels on bars.
  - Figure closes automatically when task is complete.
  - Only one figure can exist so old figures don't clutter the desktop.
  - Remaining time estimate is accurate even if the figure gets closed.
  - Minimal execution time. Won't slow down code.
  - Randomized color. When a programmer gets bored...

Demo:
  n = 1000;
  progressbar % Create figure and set starting time
  for i = 1:n
      pause(0.01) % Do something important
      progressbar(i/n) % Update figure
  end

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
progbar
This submission has inspired the following:
txtprogressbar, WORKBAR, Movie Editor, Wilcoxon signed rank examination, Hyperspectral Image Index Analysis

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.10 (2010a)

[Alan Brooks]

Very simple to use and very efficient. I like the ability to use it in one line of code.

[jiro d]

very slick!

[Antoni Josep Canós Marín]

Very good!!. It should be included in future releases of MATLAB.

[Tim Faughn]

Fantastic!

[Ryan Scheppele]

Nifty little routine!

[Fred Plourde]

Very simple and yet, very efficient ! It took me less than 2 minutes to add it successfully to my project

[Jean-Vincent LE LAN]

 

[Michal Mackiewicz]

 

[Wolfgang Garn]

An interesting extension would be to start more than one progressbars.

[Liz Leibman]

Thank you! Its just perfect! Now my program looks so good!

[Wolfgang Garn]

It is really terrific. Thank you.
If you like to have two, three or more progressbars, just copy the m-file to progressbar2, progressbar3, ...

[Bharat Rangan]

Great work. Very useful little piece. A possible addition is the ability to add another string during inititation which could specify the task at hand. Just my 0.02. Thanks a ton

[Suhas Gajre]

One of the beautiful codes I have seen!

Very much useful for programmers like me who have to wait for agonizingly long time to finish the code :))

[Tom Nagel]

I love it. So easy, so helpful.

[Dave Douglas]

This thing is simple to use and looks fantastic. Thanks!!!

[Luis Aponte]

This function is great and very simple to use.

[Quintin Coetzee]

Thak you for this substitute for waitbar.
I will be using it in software I am developing for my 4th year engineering report.

[A L P]

Have problem with this function and plotting graph.
This is the error that appear:
>??? Invalid handle object.
>
>Error in ==> progressbar at 202
>set(progpatch,'XData',[0 fractiondone >fractiondone 0])
>
>Error in ==> Untitled at 17
> progressbar(inc/nbpt)

[Quan Quach]

I made some modifications to this great app and you can find it here. Added an abort functionality and an output parameter so that when the progress bar is closed, you can use the output parameter to break from the for loop.

http://www.blinkdagger.com/matlab/matlab-gui-tutorial-progress-status-bar

[Abel Brown]

lol, so simple and nice. makes ppl think you're awesome at matlab when they see a progbar :)

like this much better than waitbar!!! Nice work

[Khaledov Kh]

Needs to name the process bar...

[jongchul kim]

slsls

[Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman]

Thanks Steve for this wonderful contribution :)

[Naor Movshovitz]

 

[Jveer]

fantastic contribution!

[James Tursa]

Nice! Easy to use. Great submission.

[Jveer]

any chance of seeing 'pause', 'resume' and 'abort' functionality in future versions?

[Steve Hoelzer]

Jveer: I've played with adding pause and abort buttons but I was never totally happy with how it turned out. The main problem is that those buttons are unresponsive in the time period between calls to progressbar. You click, and then wait until the next call to progressbar before anything happens. In some of my own code, that could be 10 minutes or a half hour. And sometimes the click isn't captured so you never get the desired behavior at all. So far I've chosen to do without rather than add a half-broken feature.

[Light Den]

It's just perfect!Thank U !

[jon erickson]

Beautiful, easy to use. A wonder matlab doesn't include this in their standard distro. Love matlab file exchange. Thanks, Steve!

[Sky Sartorius]

Quite superior to waitbar. One feature I'd really like to see is the ability to update the progress bar label(s) without resetting the progress bar and timer, letting you inform the user exactly what process or subprocess is taking so long. Excellent job on this very handy function.

[Egli Vorfi]

Excellent !

Just wanted to know if it's possible to close the bar automatically once it's over.

[Steve Hoelzer]

Egli: The bar closes automatically when you reach 100%. You can force it to close at any time by calling progressbar(1).

[Ayla]

I really like your progress bar! Would it be possible to integrate it in a custom GUI created by myself instead of displaying it in a separate window? Thanks!

[Steve Hoelzer]

Ayla: It will take a little work to put progressbar in your own GUI. You'll have to change how the bar is created so it draws in the right place in your GUI instead of its own figure. Good luck!

[halil sen]

 

[halil sen]

 

[halil sen]

 

[halil sen]

sorry about the mess, firefox failure. i wish there were a delete comment button...

anyways, first of all thank you for this efficient, fast, and handy function. i wonder whether it is possible to update the 'Label' of the bars or not. OR is it doable?

cheers

EDIT: also, one last thing as far as I can see, the 'remaining time' calculations only depend on the first bar's runtime but this is sort of misleading. maybe, the way how the remaining time is calculated can be optional (e.g. max/min of the remaining time of all bars or the bar(s) that will be used in calculations may be specified by the user or both options at the same time etc.) nevertheless, stating this calculation fact in the Help would be nice and explanatory.

btw, pardon me if i'm wrong about the way of time calculations.

[Steve Hoelzer]

Halil: There is no way to update labels without resetting the whole progress bar. I'd welcome code to implement that feature... :)

You're right about the remaining time calculation. I did it that way because of my concept of what multiple bars represent. I always think of the top bar as progress of the overall task, and other bars as progress of sub tasks. For an example of how I would use it, look at the "Fancy multi bar" demo in the progressbar's comments.

[Daniel Baur]

Wow, really great work! Love it and it works like a charm.

For my purposes though, I took the liberty of editing around in your code a bit. What I did:
- Changed from function to class, so multiple instances can be run easily and without interfering with each other.
- Incorporated label changes during execution. The bar_text property can be edited and applies again when the figure updates.
- Made the calculation of the remaining time more accurate by taking the mean of all iterations already done as iteration time.

I could send you my modified file if you'd like to have a look!

[Steve Hoelzer]

Daniel: Those sound like interesting features. I'd like see how you did it, so please send your code my way. Thanks!

[Brian Katz]

 

[Gianluca]

Thanks Steve for this fantastic tool, very simple, handy and efficient.

Is there any way to make it work in parallel computing. I run a simple test just using you "simple bar" example and it does not update the bar under the "spmd" function. Any clue of the reason?

[Steve Hoelzer]

Gianluca: Thanks for the comments!

I'm not familiar with MATLAB's parallel computing features, so I don't know for sure what's going on. My guess is that you can't update local figures from "workers", so you need to monitor their status somehow and update progressbar locally. Let me know if you figure out how to make it work.

[Boris Schauerte]

 

[Matthew Schroeder]

Great work! Any word on the ability to update labels during execution without resetting the figure?

[Steve Hoelzer]

Matthew: Thanks! As for label updates, I'm still waiting for a patch. ;)

[Benjamin Bratton]

 

[Benjamin Bratton]

This is a great piece of code that I use all the time. I appreciate how well commented the code is.

I made some updates so that the bar(s) can be embedded into a gui. I would be happy to send it your way if you like.

[Tom Hissel]

Hey Benjamin. Your addition of embedding the progress bar into the GUI seems very interesting. How did you do that? Can you post or mail your file? Id love to see how its done(I didnt manage to do that).

Also Steve, thanks for making this nice tool:)

[Y.S.]

 

[Hamid.R Ansary]

 

[Zach]

 

[Dmitry]