RKWard 0.5.4 - Plot history, bug fixes, and new possibilities for plugin writers

Monday, 4 October 2010 Tfry

The most visible change in RKWard 0.5.4 (download) may be the addition of a plot history for the on-screen graphics device. Supporting both regular and trellis plots, this can facilitate the creation and management of plots, considerably. Further, the data.frame editor now supports row names, and plugin authors now have new possibilities for scripting plugins, which we hope to put to good use in the coming releases. Documentation has been added for the functions in the rkward R package. Beyond that, there has been the usual bug fixing, and a number of assorted small new feature additions.

The changes in detail:

New features and improvements

  • Added full-featured plot history for the onscreen graphics device
  • Added option to specify default onscreen graphics dimensions
  • Added option to disable function argument hinting
  • New functions rk.show.message() and rk.show.question() for user interaction from R code
  • New options for scripting GUI logic in plugins
  • The current object of an active data editor can be referenced in plugins
  • Allow sorting of results in help search window
  • The save-object selector in plugins now allows to save as part of a data.frame / list
  • Support row names in the data.frame-editor
  • Added option to autosave script files (enabled by default)
  • The tabbar in the main window now shows a context menu with options to close/detach a window
  • The tabs in the main window can now be re-ordered by dragging with the mouse (left click if compiled with Qt 4.5 or above, middle click for earlier versions)
  • Added alternating row backgrounds in data.frame-editor

Fixes and corrections

  • Fixed: Running user commands would crash with R 2.12.0
  • Fixed: Potential crash when editing data-frame with duplicate column names
  • Fixed: Graphics windows used to assume a minimum size of 640*480 pixels, even if a smaller size was specified
  • Fixed: Placement of several menu items was broken again with KDE 4.4 and above
  • Fixed: CPU usage would go to 100% for no good reason under certain circumstances
  • Fixed: On some systems, dev.off() would spawn two new graphics windows
  • Fixed: When starting with an empty table, RKWard would sometimes claim that this object has been removed
  • Fixed: Would crash when trying to configure toolbars under certain circumstances (workaround for bug in kdelibs)
  • Fixed: Crash while analysing some objects returned by XML::xmlParseTree() for invalid XML
  • Fixed: Error while installing packages with R 2.11.0, when archiving packages in a non-existing directory

We always welcome your feedback!