Long time, no post.

So, a comment to my Cover Flow post yesterday reminded me that I haven't posted anything here in quite some time despite making a lot of progress on an R GUI over the Summer and the release of Leopard at the end of October. I have an excuse though! See, in mid-October I left academia and started working for a company in San Francisco called AdBrite. I'm pretty happy with things so far, I get to do statistics and program basically as much as I want. There were a bunch of factors that contributed to the switch from academics, most of which I'm not going to discuss on a public blog, though I'm happy to correspond via email. Long story short, AdBrite made me an offer I couldn't refuse (and it had nothing to do with the Nolan Lab, Garry and all the folks in the lab are great). The whole NIH obligation thing could become a problem (this is an area where cross discipline researchers really get screwed), but I'll deal with it as it comes, I try to think of it as a really ill-advised student loan.

Anyway, this means I haven't had much time for the R Mac GUI in the last several months as most of the work I've been doing has been more server-side rather than client-side so I haven't seen much of the R GUI and when I do see it, it happens to be on a Windows box---we have SAS and SAS notably is not available for OS X. I suppose I could Parallels it, but I'd still be running Windows and the Win64 box was already here.

I'd like to get back to it, but we'll have to see. I think at the very least I'll get the code off my backup drive and put the source code up somewhere so it isn't lost to the ages. On the bright side, a lot of the graphics drawing code made it in the core R release for 2.7.0 and the API Simon chose to adopt is fairly similar so a bunch of the graphics code can actually be removed. Simon also put paging into the core graphics device, though it's not as fun as Cover Flow or the Image Browser version (though those are Leopard specific so he can't really put it into the core R).

I think there's some useful stuff in the Console implementation, particularly the clipboard support and the improved completion/hinting support. I like Simon's idea of having a built-in console with the ability to spawn external consoles at will, there are some things (RGL comes to mind) that didn't like the RExecServer setup very much.

I'll try to post more often and get that source up somewhere. :-)