RKWard 0.6.0 is available - also on the Mac

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Today, a new version of RKWard is available for download. RKWard 0.6.0 adds initial support for debugging R code (a debugger console, and a display of current evaluation frames). Dialogs for - among others - t-tests and Wilcoxon-tests have been improved, a table of contents was added to the output window, and, as usual, many more features were added, and bugs were fixed, both in RKWard itself, and external plugins. Perhaps more importantly than all this, however, 0.6.0 is the first official release of RKWard to be readily available on Mac OS X.

Also, at this occasion, I'd like to take a short moment to look back: RKWard is approaching it's tenth anniversary, version 0.1.0 was released on November 19, 2002. During those ten years, at times, the project has been on ice, or going at glacial speed. But the project is still here and - driven by a wonderful community - it's looking younger than ever, after all this time. Many thanks to everybody involved!

As usual, please don't hesitate to send us your feedback.

The changes in detail:

  • New features and improvements
    • Preview device windows will display some status information (most importantly, warnings or errors)
    • Most plot plugins gain options to control margins and tick label orientation
    • Added option for installing packages from source (implicitly enabled on Unixoid platforms)
    • Omit comments on missing function calls in dialog code windows (e.g., if prepare() is unused, there's no "## Prepare" in the output either)
    • Output markup is now more XHTML compliant and easier to parse
    • Also save cursor position, folding, etc. for scripts. Note: Implementation details may be subject to change.
    • New function rk.list.labels() to retrieve column labels in a data.frame
    • rk.get.label() will now return an empty string ("") instead of NULL, in case no label is assigned
    • Do not offer to restore individual removed columns of a data.frame opened for editing
    • combined all Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney-tests in one plugin (from previously two separate plugins)
    • Added polyserial/polychoric correlations to correlation matrix plugin
    • Added more compression options to the "Save objects as R code" plugin
    • Added MacPorts support, see README.MacPorts and bundle build script in the macports folder
    • Added dynamically generated table-of-contents menu to output document
    • Allow some markup inside elements in plugins, and auto-add breaks only for duplicate newlines.
    • Reorganized t-test plugin, and add support for single sample t-tests
    • Box plot plugin gains more options for adding means
    • Improve keypress handling issues in the R Console, when the cursor or a selection is outside the editable range
    • Only install translations which are at least 80% complete (not counting strings in plugins, which are not yet translatable)
    • When asking for workspace file to open, use appropriate file filter
    • When configured to ask for workspace to open on startup, don't prompt to save, first
    • Simplified the "Sort Data" plugin, and added a help page
    • Added GUI support for inspecting the call stack during debugging
    • The backend executable is no longer linked against KDE libraries
    • Objects, which are not acceptable in a varslot, will still be shown, there, with a warning
  • Bugfixes
    • Fixed: Entering "0" as propabilities (quantiles) vector in distribution plugins would cause error message
    • Fixed: Wrong handling of carriage returns ('\r') in the console window
    • Fixed: Spinboxes had wrong initial values
    • Fixed: Changed configuration settings would not be saved for script editor
    • Fixed: One character missing in R commands on lines longer than 4096 characters
    • Fixed: "Next"-button in wizards would remain enabled while settings are missing on a page
    • Fixed: Dynamic pages in a wizard would cause a layout bug on the first page
    • Fixed: Plot history and graphical menus broken in some cases with R 2.15.0
    • Fixed: If the rkward package was loaded in a plain R session, q() and quit() still work
    • Fixed: Would not show output of system() commands to stderr on the console (on Unix-like systems)
    • Fixed: Function argument hints for the second half of the parameter list would not be quoted, correctly
    • Fixed: Failure to open workspaces with non-latin1 filenames from the command line
    • Fixed: Saving / restoring workplace layout would fail when saving to directories with unusual characters
    • Fixed: potential crash when clicking "Select all updates" in the package installation dialog
    • Fixed: potential crash in object name completion under certain conditions
    • Fixed: On Windows, detached windows would sometimes be positioned with the menubar outside the upper screen edge