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

adjustments to their understanding of the program, while adding the modern GUI features that
might shorten the learning curve for new users.
The second major challenge lay in generalizing the code structure to allow other programmers to
easily adapt the code to work for other CIFER ® programs, which was accomplished using the
aforementioned added navigation functionality. These navigation tools were set up to work for a
general series of windows. For this project, these were for COMPOSITE, but if windows for
another program were created, they could be easily linked. This concept was illustrated by the
lead programmer for CIFER ® at NASA, who was able to adapt the code to the MISOSA program
in a few days as opposed to the initial development, which spanned several weeks.
The development of the GUI was a significantly smaller undertaking than the development of the
command line. The GUI largely added to and enhanced the already present functionality of the
command line. Thus there were fewer technical problems associated with development. The
practices set in place from the work on the command-line interface continued to be employed for
the GUI development.
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