Matlab in iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

MATLAB Mobile

I’ve recently found out about a lightweight desktop on your iOS device called MATLAB Mobile. It connects to a MATLAB session running on the MathWorks Cloud or on your computer. It let’s you run scripts, create figures, and view results. I’ve tried it on my iPod Touch and it works great. Haven’t been able to try it on the MathWorks Cloud, but at least in my computer it works great. It has some nice features like automatic parentheses matching and special keys in the extended keyboard so that it is easier to code from the iOS keyboard. You can zoom in a figure, resize it, and play with it just as if you were on your desktop. The fact is that the figure is “actually” doing the same thing in your desktop.

I think this is a nice complement for us that use MATLAB on a daily basis. Either for research or for teaching. It’s a nice way to have the power of MATLAB at your fingertips, without having to carry around a laptop. You can have your predefined scripts and libraries without having to depend on MATLAB being installed on other computers and carrying your scripts in an pendrive. This should become available as well for use on other computers like a special VNC client.

A final note: I’ve also found a similar app from the MATLAB like software GNU-Octave, it’s called Octave Remote. Apparently is does the same thing, however only on the Cloud. I’ve tried some basic things and it seems to work quite nice. At some point it suddenly closed, but this also happens with other apps so it’s not really a surprise. We’ll see how this continues to develop.