RKWard 0.6.5 - Much improved preview functionality, and more

Thursday, 4 February 2016

Today, we are pleased to announce that again, a new version of RKWard is available for download. This new release fixes some compilation problems with the upcoming R 3.3.0. However, it is much more than a "hot fix" release. The most notable area of improvements have been previews: In addition to the time-tested plot previews, many RKWard plugins now provide previews of imported data, or results. Also, we have once again fixed various usability issues in this, and other areas (details below).

Meanwhile work continues on porting RKWard to version 5 ("frameworks") of the KDE libraries. The curious will find some first experimental binaries on our Release Schedule page.

As usual, please don't be shy of contacting us with your feedback, suggestions, and contributions!

The changes in detail:

  • New features and improvements
    • Add option to override CSS file used for the output window
    • Added context menu option to search for information on current symbol online
    • Provide better status feedback when searching / filtering among installable packages
    • Add access to basic menu items for docked previews
    • Move preview controls to the button-column of dialogs
    • Add preview to Sort data-, Subset data, and Recode categorical data-plugins
    • Add preview to Power Analysis plugin
    • Add support for adding "htmlwidget"- and "gvis"-class objects to the output window via rk.print()
    • Add plugins for importing Excel files (.xls and .xlsx, Perl- and Java-based)
    • Add ability to extract values row-wise in plugins
    • Add convenience JS-function "makeOption()" for use in plugins
    • Add previews for CSV, SPSS, and Stata import plugins
    • Allow previews for data, (HTML) output, and custom types of previews
    • Allow previews to be docked to the dialog window, and dock them, by default
    • Implicitly save code preview visibility and size (instead of the former explicit settings)
    • data.frame objects outside of globalenv() can be opened read-only in an editor window
    • Show a warning screen when invoking plugins from the command line (or from clicking an rkward://-link in an external application)
    • Use package type option "binary" from R 3.1.3 onwards, for automatic selection of the appropriate binary package
  • Fixes
    • When manually adding pluginmaps, load these after, not before other pluginmaps, by default
    • Fixed: Wizard plugins would be too small, initially
    • Fixed: Help Search was not longer working correctly with R 3.2.x
    • Fix compilation with R 3.3.x
    • Fixed: Numerical (display) precision setting was not honored in data editor
    • Fix several window activation quirks in "Focus follows mouse" mode
    • File selectors in "Import XYZ" plugins now filter for standard file extensions, by default