Some Interesting Packages in R: swfDevice, RGoogleTrends, FlashMXML, SVGAnnotation
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I love R because there are always exciting new packages which can be far beyond your imagination. Here I’d like to introduce a couple of packages that look really awesome:
1. swfDevice: R graphics device for SWF output (by Cameron Bracken)
This package is still at a pre-alpha stage but you can see a sketch now in R-Forge: https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/swfdevice/
Its author, Cameron, certainly knows well that I will be excited to see it, because I’ve been waiting for a long long time for the REAL Flash animation output in R. What I’ve done in my animation package is simply using SWF Tools to combine several “static” pictures (PNG or PDF, …) into a naive Flash animation — by “naive” I mean there is no interaction or real dynamic stuff in the Flash animation. Hopefully Cameron will provide a useful tool to create genuine Flash animations directly from R (with the help of the library libming).
By the way, I have to mention that the tikzDevice package by Cameron and another author is also fantastic for generating high-quality graphics LaTeX.
2. RGoogleTrends: Query and download Google Trends data in R
Ever heard of Google Trends? Duncan Temple Lang released an R package named “RGoogleTrends” that allows you to download Google Trends data directly from R. Basically this package uses RCurl to log in your Google account and send queries to get Google Trends data. Well, you may ask “why bother using a package since I can manually download the data by myself?”; just imagine R can automatically and dynamically do it for you, so you don’t have to open the web page every day.
3. FlashMXML and SVGAnnotation: New graphics devices for R
They are also written by Duncan Temple Lang. FlashMXML can record R graphics in MXML (a kind of XML language) and we can compile the XML file to Flash output. SVGAnnotation enables us to save R graphics in SVG format, which also supports animation. The function animate() will be of great help to my animation package, I think.
You may check the Omegahat website for more interesting packages: http://www.omegahat.org
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