App Designer Jittery and very slow

Hi!

I've been ecstatic to embrace appdesigner over the last year, but the app designer window seems to be REALLY heavy and buggy. Maybe this isn't news... But has anyone realized patterns and partial solutions to enable a more usable experience?

This post was motivated by me adding a panel, or moving a textbox to another grid spot, and now all of the elements on my app are jittering in size. If this is what's going on in the background everytime I move something, NO WONDER the designer is almost unusably slow.

Any insight is appreciated, components I should try to avoid, grid layouts that cause issues, possible hardware culprits.

I use simple apps with matlab backend, I haven't used symulink with apps yet.

Thanks so much!

Ben

FYI: Windows 10, R2021b

[Eric Delgado]

I have the same setup of you (win10 and R21b) and nothing to complain about it. Is your OS updated? Matlab could be very unpleasable in old versions of Win10. Check the driver of your GPU too.

[Jiri Hajek]

Hi, I previously experienced similar pains, but since R2022a they are almost gone. I'm not really sure about the version, but some time ago I was even eble to reproduce a particularly difficult behaviour and report it to MathWorks. Anyway, I'd recomment upgrading to R2022a, if you can.

Answer 1

[Kirthi]

Hello Benjamin,

When using the grid layout tool, this behavior is caused by a floating-point error due to the "Scrollable" property attempting to resize its children with and without a scrollbar present. This triggers the back and forth movement that you see.

As a workaround, you can turn off "Scrollable" to the component "app.GridLayout5". It can be found under 'Interactivity' in the 'Inspector' tab within the 'Component Browser'. Unchecking this property will stop the flickering effect. Following this change, you should be able to both run and save your app.

However, this behaviour had been addressed and should no longer affect MATLAB R2021b. The above workaround should resolve your issue.