[R-SIG-Mac] Trying again: package for Growl Notifications

[Simon Urbanek]

Hi Byron,

On Dec 8, 2004, at 7:54 PM, Byron Ellis wrote:

> For some reason this never went out to the list last night, so I'll 
> give it another shot (apologies if the original mysteriously appears):
>
> I got tired of patching the GUI source tree so I wrapped up my Growl 
> Notifications as a package. As an added bonus it also now works from 
> command-line R as well (ESS, X11, etc) though it can't detect when the 
> command-line R is active and suppress notifications. I also added a 
> 'growlnotify' function that lets you send an arbitrary notification 
> message from R.

just in case I forgot to respond to your first "growl" mail:
I'd veto general inclusion of the "growl" patch, because it's a 
non-standard addition to the system, which the majority of users don't 
have. However, it highlights the need for some plug-in concept in our 
GUI - the question is what functionality should we expose to such 
plugins? Cocoa has nice ways of building plugin concepts, but we'd need 
to define the GUI<->Plugin interface first. Any ideas?

> P.S. Using hints from DTL's RObjectiveC makefile this package uses 
> Objective-C without requiring a patched version of R's build scripts.

Well, except for you nobody used patched R for Obj-C ;P

>  With method swizzling, little packages have become my favored method 
> of prototyping and providing GUI features for myself.... just in case 
> y'all were interested :-)

Indeed, that's what packages are for ;). It's about linking native code 
to R. But for Cocoa, I'd use one of the Obj-C/R proxies for 
prototyping, because it's much faster - no need to re-compile 
anything... You really learn to appreciate interpreters when you test 
small and dirty things :).

Cheers,
Simon