New website... / RStudio

Yes, I know promised a new website yesterday. (Sorry, Lucia I deleted that post for no good reason.) I've delayed the launch – it wasn't quite right yet, and I need to focus on dissertation and other work for a couple of days.

Speaking of new websites, the RStudio people are awesome and have released a new graphing utility for taking R to the web. It's called htmlwidgets. You can create web-based graphs straight out of R code.

I'm using it and Plot.ly for my dissertation.

If you're interested in R, I highly recommend RStudio, especially if you're on Windows. R is fundamentally a Unix application. Very little effort is made to make the Windows version feel or function anything like a Windows application. It's not just that it's a command-line – it really is a Unix app with Unix assumptions. RStudio is much nicer from a UI standpoint, and very stable.

I see this reality a lot. Lots of cross-platform applications give up a lot in the user experience because so little effort is made to build truly native apps for each platform. Nothing is free, certainly not the time of volunteer developers, so this is understandable. I also think Microsoft is exceptionally bad at marketing – they've got some outstanding technology that no one knows about, a whole Microsoft Research division that is at the cutting edge.

I think they should launch a Reference Apps program to demonstrate what you could really achieve if you dove into the Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 platform and fully exploited it with talented developers. I'd take Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite over Windows 8.1, but it's close. And Apple's new policy of making it impossible to upgrade the internals of their computers drives me crazy – they're making computers into a disposable good. I think people (especially kids) should be encouraged to engage more deeply with the things they use and how they work – computers should be trivially easy to open and upgrade, a la Google's Ara smartphone project. And I dream of what we could do with statistics software if we focused on usability and native OS integration. Statistics software is pretty much the worst software made.