R on Mobile Devices (Android)
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com> wrote:
Harsh wrote:
At the cost of sounding far-fetched and almost incredulous, I would like to know if any R user is remotely considering the use of R on Mobile devices, and Android in particular.
In addition to the other objections in the other replies, I add this one: the assignment operator and the parens are up on ALT keys on the Android keyboard. Typing R expressions would be pretty painful. You can demo this by installing an ssh client and logging in remotely to a machine with R on it, and trying to use it remotely. A local one wouldn't be better...it might not even be faster, because the faster CPU on the machine running R might matter more than the speed of the network link between client and server. I briefly thought of what it would take to port R to an iPhone or iPod touch, and the keyboard issues would be even worse. Bottom line, R has the idiom of a real keyboard written into its bones. To be popular, a statistical analysis tool for such devices would have to work differently, taking advantage of the platform's native input mechanisms.
Just a note on porting to iPhone: the iPhone keyboard can be customised for specific applications, so you could make a keyboard with assignment and brackets prominently displayed. I'm thinking that interface-wise this would be fairly doable. Unfortunately, I believe running R on the iPhone wouldn't be allowed. The sdk states: "3.3.2 [...]No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built- in interpreter(s)." and "An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plugin architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise." I'm not too familiar with programming speech, but it seems this would cover R, no? Otherwise, I might be interested in porting R, taking it as an excuse to learn objective C and C++.... regards, Gustaf
Gustaf Rydevik, M.Sci. tel: +46(0)703 051 451 address:Essingetorget 40,112 66 Stockholm, SE skype:gustaf_rydevik