Google Summer of Code 2009

[ Cool how nobody cared about Fritz' request not to post ideas yet :) ]

[ I broadly share Oleg's "wouldn't it be nice to have better plot devices"
  wish.  But I don't think it is a three-month summer target, and it's not 
  on the side of things Fritz / Manuel prefer as it is infrastructure rather
  than pure statistics ... Then again, maybe we should put that up to a wider
  discussion.  I like 'infrastructure' as R is a platform to me. ]

| If primitive 3d scatterplot interactivity is all you want, go with  
| rggobi. It's GTK and has all this already and much more. However,  
| ggobi also shows why GTK is not a good choice for general interactive  
| graphics toolkit - it [GTK] is slow and lacks reasonable graphics  
| support. OpenGL is IMHO a better way to go since IG don't really  
| leverage any of the widgets (you get them for free via R widgets  
| packages anyway) and OpenGL gives you excellent speed, alpha-support  
| and anti-aliasing etc.

I don't want to turn this into an all-out 'vi versus emacs' slugfest but:

-- GTk it not the only choice, and I have been very happy with Qt (and Qwt
   for a simple yet nice plot widget) on both Linux and Windows; I don't have
   access to a Mac so I didn't test there.

-- Qt supports OpenGL natively. The demos are very impressive (for OpenGL as
   well as the other widgets).

-- Deepayan has been working on Qt-based code to enhance R, as that appears
   to be 'unannounced' I won't post the SVN repo but allow me to state that 
   the code already ran all (or almost all) examples from the lattice book.

Dirk

Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.