Skye,
  I ran into a similar problem with RStudio. My solution was just to check
if "windows" exists and if it does, open windows, then check "quartz" and
so forth. You can restrict the exists function to look only in grDevices.
Dave


On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 4:19 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan@club.fr>wrote:

> Le jeudi 24 octobre 2013 à 17:13 -0700, Skye Bender-deMoll a écrit :
> > Dear r-devel-opers,
> >
> > I'm working on a package that does some plot-intensive work using the
> > animation library.  It turns out that this performs very badly in the
> > RStudio plot device, which is the preferred IDE for our team.  Our
> > kludgy solution is to detect if the Rstudio device is running, and if
> > so, open another plot device to do the rendering and close it when done:
> >
> > externalDevice<-FALSE
> >    if (!is.function(options()$device)){
> >      if (names(dev.cur())=="RStudioGD"){
> >        message("RStudio's graphics device is not well supported by ndtv,
> > attempting to open another type of plot window")
> >        # try to open a new platform-appropriate plot window
> >        if (.Platform$OS.type=='windows'){
> >          windows()
> >        } else if(length(grep(R.version$platform,pattern='apple'))>0)  #
> > is it mac?
> >        {
> >          quartz()
> >        } else {  # must be unix
> >          x11()
> >        }
> >        externalDevice<-TRUE
> >      }
> >    }
> >
> > [render a whole bunch of plot frames]
> >
> > # turn off external device if using one
> >    if (externalDevice){
> >      dev.off()
> >    }
> >
> > Although this works well for us in practice, when testing against R
> > devel, we get the following NOTE:
> >
> >
> > * checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
> > Found an obsolete/platform-specific call in the following function:
> >    ‘render.animation’
> > Found the platform-specific devices:
> >    ‘quartz’ ‘windows’ ‘x11’
> > dev.new() is the preferred way to open a new device, in the unlikely
> > event one is needed.
> >
> >
> > Is there a better way to resolve this situation?  We can't use dev.new()
> > to open the plot device, because RStudio has set the value of
> > getOption("device") to "RStudioGD".  Can anyone recommend an alternative
> > method of generating a platform-appropriate device to open that won't
> > generate R CMD check issues?
> How about temporarily changing the value of the "device" option to what
> you need?
>
> I think you should also get in touch with RStudio developers to see
> whether something can be done about the poor performance.
>
>
> My two cents
>
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