How do I change the pointer property in a UI Figure generated in App Designer

In 2015a I changed the pointer property to 'watch' to indicate the program was away doing something and not frozen. For example: When reading a large binary file I set the pointer property first to 'watch', then read the file in, then changed the pointer back to 'arrow'.

if true
  set(handles.figure1, 'pointer', 'watch')
  fid= fopen(handles.fileName,'r','ieee-be');
  handles.Data = fread(fid,'uint8');
  set(handles.figure1, 'pointer', 'arrow')
end

If I tried a similar thing in App Designer (2016a) and tried to change the pointer property of the UI Figure

if true
  changePointer = set(app.UIFigure,'Pointer','watch');
end

I got the following error: "Error using matlab.ui.Figure/set Functionality not supported with figures created with the uifigure function."

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

That facility does not appear to be available yet for uifigures .

[Walter Roberson]

If the action you are doing can be broken up into chunks, then one possibility would be to use a gauge and update it as you proceed. This would be like a waitbar .

[Scorp]

Thank you for your reply, at least I am not chasing something that isn't there!

[Adam Danz]

Update, it's available as of r2020a.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/discussions/highlights/132556-new-in-r2020a-mouse-pointer-control-in-apps-uifigures