[R-SIG-Mac] R on iphone with issh

[Marc Schwartz]

On Dec 17, 2010, at 5:50 PM, Roger Koenker wrote:

> There seems to have been quite a lot of gnashing of teeth
> about running R on the iphone, but having recently installed
> issh on my iphone4 and found it capable of running R remotely -- complete
> with forwarded x11 graphics, I've been wondering what all
> the fuss was about.  Granted one would have to be rather
> desperate to do anything very elaborate on the iphone, but
> it would seem much more likely to be useful when invoking
> an R session on a remote machine that you already were familiar
> with than running de novo on the phone itself.  Setup was quite easy
> once you are able to login to a remote machine, you need only to
> enable x forwarding, and the dwm window manager and 
> then invoking a plot command sends graphics that are viewable
> by tapping the X symbol in the upper right corner of the screen
> (twice).   


Roger,

The main issue in the prior discussions was not running R remotely, but actually having an R application on the iPhone or iPad, the latter certainly being more suitable to productivity with R.

A stand-alone R application would not be possible under the current restrictions put in place by Apple, as discussed extensively in the past.

However, a remote SSH model, such as you describe, or using a client/server model via a GUI based application on the iPhone or iPad that submitted code to a remote server and returned text/graphical results (such as Wolfram|Alpha, see http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/), is certainly possible.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz