Feedback to Apple?

Hi,

Let me second Joerg van den Hoff's call for better X11 support. I'm
using R via a modified version of the R Commander GUI (that uses the
tcltk package, which requires X11 on the OS X platform) in a couple
of different classes. One thing that I found frustrating is that
Apple seems to be going to greater lengths overtime to hide the
X11user.pkg. This makes installing R on OS X seem really complicated
to students. The installation of the course software is comparatively
much more straightforward on the Windows side, leaving the
unfortunate impression that Windows is more suited to statistical
computing.

Dan

On 21-Mar-07, at 4:49 AM, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:37:14PM -0400, Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:

Hello fellow R users!

I'm currently serving as a committee member at MacResearch.org, a
website devoted to science, math, and statistics on  Macs. In about
two weeks, we'll be visiting Apple to talk about issues, needs,
desires of science users and developers:
http://www.macresearch.org/
macresearch_science_related_requests_for_apple

So I was writing to ask if you have particular questions or concerns
which I can proxy? I think this is particularly important, since  
none
of the other MacResearch representatives are statistics folks.  
(I'm a
chemist -- I'm a happy user of R for data exploration and analysis.)

For example, are all the R.app compiler problems solved? Do we need
graphing/plotting libraries for visualization from Apple? What
feedback can I pass along?

Many thanks,
-Geoff

hello,

I don't have a R- specific issue. what I _can_ say is, that for
Macs to be
accepted in scientific environments it's mandatory, that the bare
bones UNIX
side of OSX, notably full screen X11 is working competitivly to,
say, LINUX or
FreeBSD machines. for scientific purposes I find the combination of
some Aqua
apps and many X11 apps and UNIX utilities especially helpful and
superior to
using anything else.

right now X11 is OK (but not optimal), but I don't know, how the
future support
for that area will look like.

so if you could transport the message, that many many tools require
X11 and
many scientists are UNIX 'addicts', this might help (although they
sshould know).

what I have noted is, that e.g. manpage support is no good: it
seems that
quite a few of them are out of sync with the actual state of affairs.

one specific wish would be a 'canonical' rsync supporting HFS+
stuff, such
as aliases, too. (they did it with `cp', for instance). same for
other UNIX
utilities which copy data (dd, tar, ...).

joerg