My return to ggraph development was not supposed to end out with something deserving of a blog post. It was supposed to be a quick triage of bugs to quench my bad conscience for not having looked at the package for quite some time (well, the instigator was the new ggplot2 release which required some changes in ggraph). Yet, one thing lead to another and now I’m sitting here, writing a release post…
What is that? Another blog post not even a month after the last? This feels like 2017. Maybe I’m a bit extra attentive because I’ve had fun porting over my blog to quarto and also finally building a proper site for my generative art rather than lumping it into my R/OSS blog. Or maybe I just finally have interesting to share for the first time in a while… That interesting thing today is a new…
I’m pleased to announce a new release of tidygraph . It has been a while since something major has happened to the package, reflecting the stable nature of it, but this time I felt like doing a bit more than just brush it of for the occasional upstream dependency change. So, while it is in no way a grandiose release, it does contain enough new stuff to warrant a small blog post. If you are a…
I’m excited to announce the first release of the ggfx package, a package that brings R native filtering to grid and ggplot2 for the first time. You can install ggfx with: install.packages('ggfx') The purpose of ggfx is to give you access to effects that would otherwise require you to do some heavy post processing in programs such as Photoshop/Gimp or Illustrator/Inkscape, all from within R and as…
I’m delighted to announce that a new version of patchwork has been released on CRAN. This new version contains both a bunch of small bug fixes as well as some prominent features which will be showcased below. If you are unaware of patchwork, it is a package that allows easy composition of graphics, primarily aimed at ggplot2, but with support for base graphics as well. You can read more about the…
I was sure I had released this… Honestly, I thought the new version of ambient had landed on CRAN a year ago. What does that say about me as a developer? Probably not something very positive. One reason is probably that ambient is one of my smaller packages mostly made for myself. It generates noise patterns which is something I use extensively in my generative art . And the version of ambient I’m…
This is a short practical post about programming with R. Take it for what it is and nothing more… R is slow! That is what they keep telling us ( they being someone who “knows” about “real” programming and has another language that they for some reason fail to be critical about). R is a weird thing. Especially for people who has been trained in a classical programming language. One of the main…
As the year reaches its final conclusion I use to take a look back at the year that passed and do some naval gazing… I released this and that, I did a talk or two, etc. But honestly… I’ve made new releases, I have a great job that allows me to work on open source software and get paid for doing my hobby. Life is good! The world is shit though… A Plea I’ve spend most of my adult life developing…
I am super, super thrilled to finally be able to announce that patchwork has been released on CRAN. Patchwork has, without a doubt, been my most popular unreleased package and it is great to finally make it available to everyone. Patchwork is a package for composing plots, i.e. placing multiple plots together in the same figure. It is not the only package that tries to solve this. grid.arrange()…
I’m happy to announce that farver 2.0 has landed on CRAN. This is a big release comprising of a rewrite of much of the internals along with a range of new functions and improvements. Read on to find out what this is all about. The case for farver The first version of farver really came out of necessity as I identified a major performance bottleneck in gganimate related to converting colours into…
I am beyond excited to finally be able to announce a new version of ggraph. This release, like the ggforce 0.3.0 release , has been many years in the making, laying dormant for long periods first waiting for ggplot2 to get updated and then waiting for me to have time to finally finish it off. All that is in the past now as ggraph 2.0.0 has finally landed on CRAN, filled with numerous new features,…
When I announced the last release of ggforce I hinted that I would like to transition to a more piecemeal release habit and avoid those monster releases that the last one was. True to my word, I am now thrilled to announce that a new version of ggforce is available on CRAN for your general consumption. It goes without saying that this release contains fewer features and fixes than the last one,…
After what seems like a lifetime (at least to me), a new feature release of ggforce is available on CRAN. ggforce is my general purpose extension package for ggplot2, my first early success, what got me on twitter in the first place, and ultimately instrumental in my career move towards full-time software/R development. Despite this pedigree ggforce haven’t really received much love in the form of…
Just to start of the year in a positive way, I’m happy to announce that gganimate is now available on CRAN. This release is the result of a pretty focused development starting in the spring 2018 prior to my useR keynote about it. Some History The gganimate package has been around for quite some time now with David Robinson making the first commit in early 2016. David’s vision of gganimate revolved…
The year is nearly over and it is the time for reflection and navel-gazing. I don’t have incredibly profound things to say, but a lot of things happened in 2018 and this is as good a time as any to go through it all… Picking Myself Up The prospects of my “2017 in review” post were not particularly rosy… I had hit somewhat of a burnout in terms of programming, but was none the less positive and had…
Once again, I gives me great pleasure to announce a new package has joined CRAN. transformr is the spatial brother of tweenr and as with the tweenr update a few months ago, this package is very much driven by the infrastructural needs of gganimate . It is probably the last piece needed before I can begin preparing gganimate for CRAN, so if you are waiting for that there is indeed reason for…
NOTE: tweenr was released some time ago but a theft of my computer while writing the release post meant that I only just finished writing about it now. I’m very happy to once again announce a package update, as a new major version of tweenr is now on CRAN. This release, while significant in itself, is also an important part of getting gganimate on CRAN, so if you care about gganimate but have…
This is my first blog post about gganimate — a package I’ve been working on since mid-spring this year. I have many thoughts and lots to say about animation and gganimate , so much in fact that it has seemed too big a task to begin writing about. Further, I felt like I had to spend my time developing the thing in the first place. So this is an alternative entrance into writing about gganimate —…
I’m happy to once again announce the release of a package. This time it happens to be a rather unplanned and quick new package, which is fun for a change. The package in question is scico which provides access to the colour palettes developed by Fabio Crameri as well as scale functions for ggplot2 so they can be used there. As there is not a lot to talk about in such a simple package I’ll also…
I’m happy to report a new major release of lime has landed on CRAN. lime is an R port of the Python library of the same name by Marco Ribeiro that allows the user to pry open black box machine learning models and explain their outcomes on a per-observation basis. It works by modelling the outcome of the black box in the local neighborhood around the observation to explain and using this local…