[Rd] [R-gui] R GUI considerations

[Philippe Grosjean]

... A couple of screenshots of your GUI would help those who don't have 
time to download and install your software to visualize what you did.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean

..............................................<°}))><........
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Prof. Philippe Grosjean
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems
  ) ) ) ) )   Mons-Hainaut University, Pentagone (3D08)
( ( ( ( (    Academie Universitaire Wallonie-Bruxelles
  ) ) ) ) )   8, av du Champ de Mars, 7000 Mons, Belgium
( ( ( ( (
  ) ) ) ) )   phone: + 32.65.37.34.97, fax: + 32.65.37.30.54
( ( ( ( (    email: Philippe.Grosjean at umh.ac.be
  ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (    web:   http://www.umh.ac.be/~econum
  ) ) ) ) )          http://www.sciviews.org
( ( ( ( (
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Peter Kleiweg wrote:
> James Wettenhall schreef op de 21e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:
>  
> 
>>We may have to agree to disagree about some things, but I hope 
>>this has made my point of view a little clearer.
> 
> 
> Actually, your elaborate response makes much sense to me. I 
> understand now that it is not just about replacing the command 
> line with a GUI. It is not like LaTeX versus Word (i.e. good 
> versus bad), but about organising and streamlining tasks, doing 
> "higher level" things. At least, that is what I think it is.
> 
> This is a topic I have been struggling with for quite some time. 
> For years, I have been working on software for dialectometrics 
> and cartography. At the beginning, just for doing research at 
> our institute. But soon, it developed into something people from 
> other institutes can use. A large set of command line programs, 
> manual pages, an R interface, and quite an extensive tutorial 
> with example material.
> 
> My employer urged me to add some sort of GUI. It would make more 
> people willing to try using the software. I resisted the idea of 
> a GUI. For one thing, I work on Linux but the GUI should be used 
> on Windows. (Java is too bothersome. Smalltalk too clumsy. And I 
> didn't know about Python yet.) But the main problem was: I had 
> no idea what a GUI should look like, what it was supposed to do. 
> It took me quite some time, working with my own software, before 
> I was able to look at it from a distance. The software is just a 
> toolkit. I didn't want a Graphical Toolkit. What I wanted was 
> something like a Graphical Project Manager, something task 
> oriented, with and interactive help system that guides the user 
> through the work.
> 
> It is still fresh. I haven't had any responses on people using 
> the GUI, so I don't know yet if this is what people helps. What 
> I still think as one of the biggest obstacles for using my 
> software is not cured by the GUI. You still need to select and 
> prepare the data. If you want maps, you have to provide map 
> data, in a format the software understands.
> 
> This GUI I built is quite specific. It assumes a quite narrow 
> purpose (though parts of the software can be used independently 
> for quite other purposes): you start with a set of dialect data, 
> you do some calculations on that data to make estimates of 
> differences between dialects, and you visualise these dialect 
> differences on a geographic map.
> 
> I still don't see anything like that for R. A general GUI for R? 
> What are the "higher level task" you use R for? It only makes 
> sense to me if you want to use R in a specific field, such as in 
> Bioconductor. You build a GUI to that specific higher level 
> application of R.
> 
> Or does anyone want to transform R into something like a 
> spreadsheet program? There are people making a GUI for LaTeX to 
> make it look like Word, a WYSIWYG, but to me that seems like a 
> very silly thing to do.
> 
> For those interested, here is my software:
> 
>     http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/
> 
> And the GUI is here:
> 
>     http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/L04/pyL04/
>