[R-gui] More doodles for a GUI: dy/dx and integral buttons

[James.Callahan at CityofOrlando.net]

More doodles for a GUI....dy/dx and integral buttons

Some GIS programs have a magnifying glass to zoom in a portion of the map. 
You click on the magnifying glass, the cursor becomes a magnifying glass 
and you click on an area of the map with the magnifying glass and that 
area of the map zooms in.

Suppose you have a dy/dx tool. You graph on the screen, you click on the 
dy/dx tool, the cursor becomes a dy/dx symbol. You hover over a portion of 
the curve and a box pops up telling you the slope of the curve at that 
point.  You click on the "elongated S" integral symbol and you find you 
can paint an area under the curve (or equivalently you click on a paint 
symbol to paint and then you click on the integral symbol to compute the 
area). You then click on an equals sign and a box pops up telling you in 
addition to the area under the curve -- the name of the method used to 
calculate the area, the formula used and the numeric value for the area 
complete with units.

Not very useful in production, but what a teaching tool.

I am not sure I would want that, but for the moment, I would hope our 
minds would be free enough to imagine 
(without being too constrained by implementation) what would be useful -- 
and not just "File->Print."

In some of the R graphics programs, you can already identify points by 
clicking on them.

How about a "jitter" button to apply jitter to a graph?

A graph menu with a icons representing a histogram, a scatterplot, or a 
q-q plot?

How about adding confidence intervals / bands with just a few clicks?

How do you move from isolated tricks like clicking on points -- to a 
comprehensive GUI environment?

How would the interface facilitate exploratory data analysis?

How would the interface facilitate verifying the data was read in 
correctly?

How would the interface facilitate organizing and retrieving data?

How do you visualize random number generation? Should we show a graph that 
looks like a firing range with bullets being shot at it,
perhaps with sound effects?

Perhaps a tactile interface that would enable one to feel the weight of a 
slice of a probability distribution, from the feather-light tail of a 
distribution
to a heavy lead weight towards the center of the distribution. Perhaps one 
could feel the "leverage" of outliers?

What would be truly useful?  What would be merely "cute?" and what would 
get in the way?

Jim Callahan
Management, Budget & Accounting
City of Orlando
(407) 246-3039 office
(407) 234-3744 cell phone
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