I love R because there are always exciting new packages which can be far beyond your imagination. Here I’d like to introduce a couple of packages that look really awesome:

1. swfDevice: R graphics device for SWF output (by Cameron Bracken)

This package is still at a pre-alpha stage but you can see a sketch now in R-Forge: https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/swfdevice/

Its author, Cameron, certainly knows well that I will be excited to see it, because I’ve been waiting for a long long time for the REAL Flash animation output in R. What I’ve done in my animation package is simply using SWF Tools to combine several “static” pictures (PNG or PDF, …) into a naive Flash animation — by “naive” I mean there is no interaction or real dynamic stuff in the Flash animation. Hopefully Cameron will provide a useful tool to create genuine Flash animations directly from R (with the help of the library libming).

By the way, I have to mention that the tikzDevice package by Cameron and another author is also fantastic for generating high-quality graphics LaTeX.

Today Romain Francois posted an interesting topic in the R-help list, and you can read his blog post for more details: celebrating R commit #50000. 50000 is certainly not a small number; we do owe R core members a big “thank you” for their great efforts in this fantastic statistical language in the 13 years. When I saw Romain’s data, I suddenly remembered a question I asked to one of Prof Ripley’s student a couple of years ago: does Prof Ripley ever sleep? And he answered “No!”. No wonder we can see Prof Ripley so frequently in the R-help/devel mailing list. If you have stayed on R-help list for enough long time, you’ll surely know several facts, e.g. Martin Maechler will arrive in less than 3 minutes if you dare call an R package “library”, and you will get “Ripleyed” if you are not careful enough in posting your R code.

> library(fortunes)
> fortune("Ripleyed")

And the fear of getting Ripleyed on the mailing list also makes me think, read,
and improve before submitting half baked questions to the list.
 -- Eric Kort
 R-help (January 2006)