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Some Tips about developing an interface.

3 messages · Gilvan, John Fox, Bert Gunter

Original
John Fox
# 
Dear Gilvan,

See the R-GUI web site <http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/> for a variety of
information.

I hope this helps,
 John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
--------------------------------
1 day later
Bert Gunter
# 
In addition to John Fox's recommendations, some further hints and resources
are:

The tools of TCL/TK allow one to develop a comprehensive GUI. Note that the
Bioconductor project, http://www.bioconductor.org/ , has some packages
(tkWidgets, widgetTools are at least two that I know of) that claim to
simplify TK GUI development by allowing one to build GUI's without directly
having to learn TK. These are referenced at the GUI web site John pointed
you to.

In addition, I have found it useful to build very ** primitive, crude **
interfaces using a few native Windows capabilities built into the R for
Windows version (courtesy of Duncan Murdoch and Brian Ripley, I believe).
See, e.g. select.list, winDialog, winMenuAdd, and file.choose to see what's
available and get the links to remaining features. Finally, I have also used
plain old cat() and readline() for text interfacing. While these would be
considered laughable by professional standards, I have found that they allow
me to quickly build serviceable interfaces for relatively simple
applications (a very limited and structured set of tasks). When the
applications are to be used by only a very small number of users, I think
it's worth considering this approach, as building full-fledged GUI's in all
their glory is a difficult task, as I'm sure John would testify.

Cheers,

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box