[Rkward-devel] Comments on design issues

[Jim Robison-Cox]

Hello RKWard,

 I'm a statistician (prof, teacher, researcher) at Montana State Univ. who
uses R alot.  I'm investigating the various GUI projects to see what's
available.  For myself, I'm most comfortable using the command line
interface, and it would slow me down to use a GUI.  I often teach stat
computing to our own stat majors, and I would also have them learn command
line.  However, I also teach many non-statisticians, and it would be nice
to simplify life for those folks by offering a GUI alternative.

  Though I'm very competent in R, I'm not a C++ programmer, and am not
volunteering on that end.  I would be interested in discussing design
issues.  You mention following the SPSS paradigm.  I must say that I find
that very limiting.  The thing I love about R is that I can have multiple
objects/datasets in the workspace, including analyses and functions.  If I
were designing a GUI, I would make it like that of
  DataDesk. The basic workspace is more like a desktop with objects.
  It has the nice feature that results or plots can be clicked in a
           corner to obtain a list of further suggested steps.  For
           instance with a scatterplot, you would have the choice of
           adding a regression line.  WIth  regression output, a choice is
           to plot residuals.
        http://datadesk.com/

Also interesting:
  ViSta   -- charts the analyses which have been run, and makes it easy to
             go back and modify analyses.  Again it has a sort of desktop
            of results.
        http://forrest.psych.unc.edu/research/index.html


  A few programming questions to illustrate my ignorance:
Would it not help to use Gtk and the library at Omeghat with connections
to R?  http//www.omegahat.com
  If the goal is to pass data &objects to/from R and an office suite,
does Koffice have something equivalent to Gnome-bonobo to assist in that
chore?  I do use Linux, but not Koffice, so I'm curious about its
advantages.
  Is the difficulty with plots the problem of making them editable?  Does
the xfig device in R create a plot which has editable components?
  Most of my students use R in Windows, and the copy plots to the
clipboard and paste them into Word.  You want to be able to update plots
as the data is modified?

Congratulations on the t-test example.  I'll look for code releases soon.
Jim

Jim Robison-Cox               ____________
Department of Math Sciences  |            |       phone: (406)994-5340
2-214 Wilson Hall             \   BZN, MT |       FAX:   (406)994-1789
Montana State University       |  *_______|
Bozeman, MT 59717-2400          \_|      e-mail: jimrc at math.montana.edu