RKward 0.4.2 review

RKWard is meant to become an easy to use, transparent frontend to the R-language, a very powerful, yet hard-to-get-into scripting-lan

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Pierre

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RKWard is meant to become an easy to use, transparent frontend to the R-language, a very powerful, yet hard-to-get-into scripting-language with a strong focus on statistic functions. RKward will not only provide a convenient user-interface, however, but also take care of seamless integration with an office-suite. Practical statistics is not just about calculating, after all, but also about documenting and ultimately publishing the results.

RKWard then is (will be) something like a free replacement for commercial statistical packages. In addition to ease of use, three aspects are particularily important:

1: It will be a transparent interface to the underlying R-language. That is, it will not hide the powerful syntax, but merely provide a convenient way, in which both newbies and R-experts can accomplish most of their tasks. A GUI can never provide an interface to the whole power of a language like R. In some cases users will want to tweak some functions to their particular needs and esp. to automate some tasks. By making the "inner workings" visible to the user, RKWard will make it easy for the user to see where and how to use R-syntax to accomplish their goals.

2: For the output, RKWard strives to separate content and design to a high degree. It will not try to design its own tables/graphs, etc, which have to be converted to the style used in the rest of a publication by hand. Currently RKWard uses HTML for its output. Using appropriate style definitions reformatting this output to match the rest of the publication will be easily doable. In future releases RKWard will even seek stronger integration with existing office suites.

3: It relies on a language, that is not only very powerful, but also extensible, and for which dozens of extensions already exist.

What's New in This Release:
code generated by scatterplot plugin is simplified somewhat
add comment headers to the sections of commands produced by plugins
if a user command results in the output html file to be modified, auto-refresh output
add RMB menu to script editor windows
add options "clear" and "configure" in the console RMB menu, and the command log RMB menu
add option to save workplace layout not per workspace, but at the end of the session
add options ("printcmd") to settings
fix help menu for detached windows
R X11 device windows are now managed by rkward, with the following initial features:
R X11 device windows: attach to / detach from workplace (they start detached)
R X11 device windows: toggle between normal resize mode and (settable) fixed size with scrollbars
R X11 device windows: menu options to copy / print / duplicate / save / activate devices
fixed: selecting Window->Close in a detached window would only close the internal view, not the window
when detaching a window, give it a more reasonable size
do not open the same script url twice (instead the corresponding window is raised on the second attempt)
fixed: when closing a detached script editor window, you would not be asked to save changes (if any)
fixed: occasional crash when re-attaching a script editor window
new translations: Greek, Catalan
updated translations: German, French
added basic plot facility for ECDF (Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function) (menu plots)
added ptukey and qtukey (Studentized Range Distribution (Tukey)) (menu distributions)
spelling corrections in distributions menu
reorganized "Descriptive Statistics" plugin to use tabs for better usability
added constant for mad in descriptive statistics plugin
fix bug in rk.get.label ()
in script editor, do not provide symbol name completion while in comments
properly support active bindings in globalenv ()
if not started in a tty, spawn a konsole. R will go into non-interactive mode otherwise