As you probably know, I am one of the strongest proponents of the Shiny package for developing interactive web applications

Amongst the latest news from RStudio is that what was planned to be commercial software will now be free and Open Source (AGPLv3 license)

To celebrate this momentous announcement, I have produced an Earthquake app. It was ‘inspired’ by a recent blog post which was quite interesting for a user with R installed and wanting to learn more about the maps package. Now, it starts to turn it into an app that can be used by anyone on the web, providing the user with options to vary time-period, earthquake magnitude and country of origin

Click for larger image. If Shiny/R had been invented 50 years ago I could have discovered Plate Tectonics!

I stress the “starts to turn it into an app” as this is what I will call a proof-of-concept app. There is so much out there to develop in this medium – and by far more proficient R developers – that I plan to initialize several Shiny apps that others can pick up and run with if they so desire. The gist for this app can be found here

Other than the fact that the selectable countries exclude Japan but include USSR there are several potential enhancements that came to me immediately

• Extend to shorter time periods as alternatives to years
• Add source to enable plotting lower magnitudes to show at smaller geographical areas e.g. counties
• Assess other plotting packages e.g. ggplot2
• Offer user option of splitting magnitudes by count rather than same-size cuts
• Add more information on graph and/or table re time, position of some/all quakes

Let me know of any developments you make via the comments

On a side note, the Wiki Search Rates app now has an option to download the graph data as a csv file. Extremely useful for further analyses so one more heads up to the guys at RStudio (192)