[rkward-devel] new feature ideas

[meik michalke]

hi,

next to the ongoing processes regarding KDE and KF5, i would like to discuss 
some ideas for future versions of RKWard.

- new dialog type to contruct models
there are several cases where designing a GUI is a bit useless, because a key 
problem is the specification of a more or less complex model. for instance, 
have a look at the examples here:
 http://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/mpt/functions/mptspec
you can probably do this with formula fields, but that's rather the opposite 
of what i'd expect of a GUI. such a model is much easier to understand (and 
design in the first place) if it's presented in its actual processing tree 
structure:
 http://singmann.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2htm-600x414.png
it should be possible to come up with something like a model conctrutor window 
that is generic enough to be useful for multiple of these modelling cases. 
this would be something totally new, of course, like an empty canvas where you 
could add node objects (which could be linked to varaibles in a data.frame, 
for instance) and connect them to describe relations, probably similar to what 
morten mooshagen implemented in his multiTree software:
 http://multitree.psychologische-forschung.org/multiTreeTutorial_ModelBuilder/multiTreeTutorial_ModelBuilder.html

- further enhancing the package management: show package info on mouseover
this is much simpler, i'd like to see the package information in a mouseover 
hint, like it is already available for plugins. this is interesting for me to 
immediately  see which other packages are a dependency or suggested.

- supporting distribution packages of R packages
it would still be cool to be able to check for package availability in 
distribution repositories. debian based distributions can install most of the 
packages from cran via the package management (e.g., for ubuntu there's the 
c2d4u PPA), and they are usually called r-cran-<package name in lowercase>, or 
r-other-<repository>-<package name in lowercase>. i do these checks manually 
and would like to have some kind of automation for the process.

- make the repository choice permanent more easily
if it's possible, i would like a checkbox in the R package repo dialog that 
comes up when you want to manage packages and haven't configured a mirror 
already. it should read like "remember my choice" and write the chosen 
repository to the configuration, like it would if you used the configure 
dialog.

so much for the ideas.


viele grüße :: m.eik

-- 
  dipl. psych. meik michalke
  institut f"ur experimentelle psychologie
  abt. f"ur diagnostik und differentielle psychologie
  heinrich-heine-universit"at d-40204 d"usseldorf
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