In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio’s Viewer pane (introduced with version 0.98.441).
Over 80% in my little survey favoured the new default output mechanism of googleVis within RStudio. Hence, I uploaded googleVis 0.4.7 on CRAN over the weekend.
However, there were also some thoughtful comments, which suggested that the RStudio Viewer pane is not always the best option. Indeed, Flash charts and gvisMerge output will still be displayed in your default browser, but also if you work on larger charts and with smaller screen, then the browser might still be the better option compared to the Viewer pane - of course you can launch the browser from the Viewer pane as well.
The Google Charts Tools provide two kinds of heat map charts for geographical data, the Flash based Geomap and the HTML5/SVG based Geochart.
I prefer the Geochart as it doesn’t require Flash, but so far there have been two shortcomings with it: I couldn’t add additional tooltip information and the default Mercator projection shows Greenland the size of Africa. Both of those issues seemed to have been resolved by Google.
The guys at RStudio have done a fantastic job with shiny. It is really easy to build web apps with R using shiny. With the help of Joe Cheng from RStudio we figured out a way to make googleVis work on shiny as well. This allows you to make use of the Google Charts Tools in your shiny app directly from R. What I present here are three initial examples which seem to work in most browsers.
The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to this topic. Version 3 of the DataFinder App allows you to visualise the data on your phone, including motion maps, see the screen shot below. Screen shot of DataFinder 3.0 I was intrigued by the by the changes in life expectancy over time around the world.
The guys behind the Google Visualisation API don’t seem to rest. On 22 February 2012 they released an update of their API. Google added options for a gradient colour axis to bubble chart and a magnifying glass to geo chart, which opens when the user hovers over cluttered markers (excluding IE<=8). Those updates have been incorporated into version 0.2.15 of the googleVis package for R. Examples of new features Here are two examples demonstrating the new features.
On 7th December Google published a new version of their Visualisation API. The new version adds a new chart type: Stepped Area Chart and provides improvements to Geo Chart. Now Geo Chart has similar functionality to Geo Map, but while Geo Map requires Flash, Geo Chart doesn’t, as it renders SVG/VML graphics. So it also works on your iOS devices. These new features have been added to the googleVis R package in version 0.