R on iphone with issh
On Dec 17, 2010, at 5:50 PM, Roger Koenker wrote:
There seems to have been quite a lot of gnashing of teeth about running R on the iphone, but having recently installed issh on my iphone4 and found it capable of running R remotely -- complete with forwarded x11 graphics, I've been wondering what all the fuss was about. Granted one would have to be rather desperate to do anything very elaborate on the iphone, but it would seem much more likely to be useful when invoking an R session on a remote machine that you already were familiar with than running de novo on the phone itself. Setup was quite easy once you are able to login to a remote machine, you need only to enable x forwarding, and the dwm window manager and then invoking a plot command sends graphics that are viewable by tapping the X symbol in the upper right corner of the screen (twice).
Roger, The main issue in the prior discussions was not running R remotely, but actually having an R application on the iPhone or iPad, the latter certainly being more suitable to productivity with R. A stand-alone R application would not be possible under the current restrictions put in place by Apple, as discussed extensively in the past. However, a remote SSH model, such as you describe, or using a client/server model via a GUI based application on the iPhone or iPad that submitted code to a remote server and returned text/graphical results (such as Wolfram|Alpha, see http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/), is certainly possible. Regards, Marc Schwartz