RKWard 0.5.7 - Support for R 2.14.0, improved package management, and more

Sunday, 23 October 2011

RKWard 0.5.7 is available for (download) today. Importantly, this version supports the upcoming version 2.14.0 of R. But there are many more reasons to update, today: We have re-thought our approach to downloading RKWard add-ons, and have replaced out previous solution with one that is based on regular R packages. Some first add-ons based on the new solution are already available, including the rkwarddev-package, aimed at making it even easier to create plugins for RKWard. As a side product, the package installation dialog has been modernized. But also there are many new features and bugfixes all over the place.

Read on, below, for more detail. And remember: We need your feedback!

The changes in detail:

  • New features and improvements
    • Offer to add a new library location, automatically, if location selected for installation is not writable
    • Reworked package installation / update dialog
    • Documentation on writing RKWard plugins is now accessible, locally
    • The file filter for R script files is now configurable, and includes *.Rhistory, by default
    • More obvious coloring of variable entry fields requiring user input in plugins
    • Default size of the code display in plugin dialogs has been increased
    • Removed support for downloading plugins using GHNS
    • Added support for RKWard plugins shipped inside R packages
    • Removed option to set options("printcmd")
    • New option to run arbitrary (setup) commands in each session
    • Added new pseudo graphics device "rk.printer.device" to provide printing via the KDE printer dialog
    • Support the results list new help.search() in R 2.14.x, which includes vignettes and demos
    • rk.edit.files() and rk.show.files() gain parameter "prompt", which can be used to suppress user prompt
    • Added function rk.demo(), which is similar to demo(), but opens the example script in a script editor window
    • Added shortcut Ctrl+Enter to insert a line break and submit from a script editor
    • Reduce CPU usage while idle
    • Bar plot, dot chart, pie chart, and Pareto plot plugins gain more tabulation options
    • rk.results() now prints rownames, where appropriate
    • "frame" elements in plugins can now be made checkable
    • Disabling or hiding a plugin component makes it non-required, implicitly
    • Box plot gains option to dogde grouped boxes
    • Simplify internal handling of system() and system2() output
    • Simplify code produced by several plugins
  • Bugfixes
    • Fixed: Would not system-defined text color for argument hints
    • Do not treat arrays (which are not a matrix) as hierarchical named objects in the object browser
    • Do not analyse more than 100000 name child-objects per object (avoids hangs on such extreme data)
    • Fixed: Problems with using mclapply() inside RKWard
    • Fixed: Integrated help browser would not update navigation history when following page internal links
    • Fixed: PDFs and many other types of documents linked from help pages would not be opened, correctly
    • Added support for R 2.14.x
    • Fixed: Printing was broken when kprinter is not available
    • Fixed: Some plugin dialogs would not become visible, or be shown in very small size, with some window managers
    • Fixed: Potential crash when using context menus with "focus follows mouse" window activation policy
    • Fixed: Occasional duplication of first letter of keyword, when using "Copy lines to output" from the console window