Matlab R2006a impressions

Until recently I was using Matlab 6.5 (R13) for both my academic and professional research projects. I tried using Matlab 7 (R14) several times (university, friends, etc.) but the UI was so slow I never seriously considered upgrading.

Along came Matlab R2006a, which I am now using a lot. The UI is still much slower than 6.5, but not slow enough to become a showstopper. Here is a short summary of my impressions of R2006a, with emphasis on the new features interesting to my work:

1. Overal performance:
1. Calculations - I really don't know. Supposedly, some of the functions were optimized (I ran into at least one or two) but I really couldn't tell I felt a difference (though it doesn't mean there isn't)
2. UI - Version 6.5 (R13) was very stable, fast and with a relatively low memory footprint. Version 7.0 (R14) was such a nightmare in terms of UI performance that it was mostly unusable. Version R2006a is much better than version 7. It's not as responsive as 6.5 (especially startup), but it's absolutely usable. Also, it has some cool added features (enhanced debugging, tabbed windows, etc) that makes it worthwhile.
2. Support Vector Machines - It's the first version with an SVM library. It's extendible and rather simple to use, but is slower than SVMLight. Also, it seems to me that in terms of accuracy it is also inferior compared to SVMLight (although I'm sure it depends a lot on the problem at hand). I have the feeling that their SVM support is still at its infancy, and I dare assume it will evolve with their next versions. For now, it's just a set of function in the Bioinformatics toolbox... Anyway, if you want a simple way to use SVMLight from Matlab, try this out .
3. Genetic Algorithms - The GA library is a real kick! It has all the features you can find in other libraries available online, and more. Also, the UI is very nice and easy to configure. It also generates graphs out-of-the-box that are much more informative than those I've been using so far. The downside is that the documentation sucks (especially when using bit strings) and that I had to debug and solve 2 bugs in the original Matlab code (!!!) to make it work properly with bit strings (I may post on this some time in the future). This being behind me, I think it's a very good library in all important ways: seems to do a good exploration of the search space (not too susceptible to local minima), fast execution, easy configuration, cool graphs, etc.
4. Distributed Computing - I only had a short time to test it at a remote location. Yet I couldn't make it work. The architecture is very simple, but the various components kept getting stuck and loosing connection for no apparent reason.

P.S: I'm posting this using Windows Live Writer - interesting to see how this turns out...