CIFER®-MATLAB Interfaces: Development and ... - Cal Poly

errors, they are all displayed at once when the program finishes. Thus, a new CIFER ® user could
get more lost and confused by starting off with the command-line interface. The power of the
interface, as mentioned before, is the ability to script multiple cases, which is something
beginning users would find less beneficial than experienced users.
A detailed help document was created for the command-line interface to help users understand
how to employ it. The text of this document can be found in Appendix B, and Appendices C
through I contain the appendices from the original document. Ames engineers were provided
copies of the document along with the software when they employed the new interface in their
projects. The document was written with the assumption that a reader would already be familiar
with CIFER ® .
3.2 Graphical User Interface Development
COMPOSITE was selected as the test program around which to develop a MATLAB GUI. It was
deemed sufficiently complex to make a useful example, and it is one of the more commonly used
CIFER ® programs from those selected for this project. The primary goal of the GUI development
was to show that, first, it could be done, and second, the process of data entry could be enhanced
using more modern GUI tools. An important secondary goal was to create the GUI as a rough
template that could be efficiently applied to the rest of the CIFER programs in the future. The
GUI was written to work with the command-line interface, using graphics to gather the
information to be sent to the command-line functions without the user needing to know how the
command-line functions work. It is important to note that the GUI programming does not stand
alone as the command-line does and is to demonstrate how advances in GUI programming can
make CIFER ® more user friendly.
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