Matlab gui: grayed out button not working properly

Hello everybody,

I have a strange problem. I want that some buttons are grayed out when doing a computation. In my button1_Callback I placed the following code:

set(handles.button1,'Enable','off');
set(handles.button2,'Enable','off');
set(handles.button3,'Enable','off');
pause(0.1)

%... doing a calculation which plots a function (total time a couple of seconds)

set(handles.button1,'Enable','on');
set(handles.button2,'Enable','on');
set(handles.button3,'Enable','on');

Like you can notice, I need to add the line pause(0.1) otherwise the code won't work. The buttons will become unclickable during the computation but not grayed out.. I tried everything but only adding this little pause will make the buttons grayed out during the computation. Somebody any idea on what's going on? It doesn't look normal that I need to add the little pause.

Thanks,

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

MATLAB races ahead and gets all tied up in doing some intensive computation that it thinks is more important than processing the message to repaint your display. Putting in a pause allows it that time, but a better option is to put in a "drawnow" instead of the pause():

drawnow

This will force the operating system to repaint/refresh/update your GUI display before continuing on with the subsequent code.

[JS]

Ok, thank you very much for the explanation, it works. And the drawnow looks better than the pause(0.1).