[Rd] R graphics device for flash apps

[Jeffrey Horner]

Byron,

I just read your blog (statcomp.blogspot.com, linked from your other 
post) and rand across your idea of an R/Flash graphics device. I've also 
been giving this some thought because of this amazing interactive flash app:

http://tools.google.com/gapminder

and others from http://www.gapminder.org/.

I would love more than anything to work on this. The only hitch is that 
I'm so booked up with work (not to mention a new RApache release soon) 
that I don't have the time. And believe me, getting even minimal 
functionality to work, like 2D images with pop-ups labels and such... 
would be a tremendous development effort. Not to mention trying to keep 
up with an implementation for different OS's and flash player versions.

So I have questions for the R development community:

1. Are there others interested in this? Is anyone working on an 
implementation? If not, is it too niche to even consider doing?

2. Could a project like this obtain funding, any kind, not just academic?

3. How does the community feel about a closed-source version?
There are other closed-source packages available for R (the only one I 
know of is xlsReadWrite), so it seems to be a reasonable question.

Comments, criticisms, flames... are all welcome. Email me off-list if 
you'd like.

Jeff
-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner