googleVis code development moved to GitHub

8 comments
After nearly 4 years of developing googleVis on Google Code with SVN we decided to move to GitHub. The main reason was that Google stopped the facility of hosting pre-CRAN builds of the package for user testing. The devtools package on the other hand makes it really easy to install packages from source hosted on GitHub. Additionally, we hope that GitHub will make collaboration with others more effective. Thus, bookmark http://github.com/mages/googleVis.

Screen shot of some of the new features in googleVis 0.5.0-1.

There are some exciting new features in the development version of 0.5.0-1 of googleVis, reflecting the enhanced Google Chart Tools API:

New Features

  • New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram, gvisCalendar and gvisTimeline to support the new Google charts of the same names (without 'gvis').
  • New demo Trendlines showing how trend-lines can be added to Scatter-, Bar-, Column-, and Line Charts.
  • New demo Roles showing how different column roles can be used in core charts to highlight data.
  • New vignettes written in R Markdown showcasing googleVis examples and how the package works with knitr.

Changes

  • The help files of gvis charts no longer show all their options, instead a link to the online Google API documentation is given.
  • All googleVis output will be displayed in your default browser. In previous versions of googleVis output could also be displayed in the preview pane of RStudio. This feature is no longer available with the current version of RStudio, but is likely to be introduced again with the release of RStudio version 0.99 or higher.

I will post about the new features and changes in the coming weeks. Please feel free to test the development version already. Visit our GitHub project page for installation instructions and further details.

For the impatient (you will require R >= 3.0.2):
install.packages(c("devtools","RJSONIO", "knitr", "shiny", "httpuv"))
library(devtools)
install_github("mages/googleVis")

8 comments :

Zachary Mayer said...

This is a great move! Github really encourages collaboration through pull requests.

Tal Galili said...

I love github, and your package - I am glad to read about your decision - way to go Markus!

David Ibarra said...

I have checked a few examples (Calendar, Annotated, ...). Great job!

Only a problem with gvisTimeline, I am using datetime for dates ("POSIXct" "POSIXt", that is using also hours minutes and seconds) and the routines that check for the supported type it just sais it's not supported:

Error en gvis(type = type, checked.data, options = options, chartid = chartid, :
Only the following data types are allowed: number, string, date
However, StartTimeStamp, EndTimeStamp is of type datetime, datetime

But in the other hand on google developer page (https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/timeline) uses examples with hours:
...
[ 'Magnolia Room', 'Beginning JavaScript', new Date(0,0,0,12,0,0), new Date(0,0,0,13,30,0) ],
...


Is there other kind of datetime type?


Again thumbs up! Great job!

Markus Gesmann said...

Hi David,


Thanks for pointing this out. This should now work with googleVis 0.5.0-2. There is an additional example in the help file as well.


Cheers


Markus

David Ibarra said...

Yes! Now it works with time details (datetime)


Thank you

Akshay said...

Hi Markus,
I just used your package and it is fantastic, thanks for the great job.
The problem for me was that, with earlier package I couldn't customize tooltips.
In your package, I am able to do it for Column, line, bar and scatter chart.
However, I also want to use custom tooltip for TreeMap.
Can you tell me, how to do the same? I am able to do it with google dev api but not googlevis package.


Thanks

Markus Gesmann said...

Hi Akshay,
Unfortunately, tooltips for tree maps are currently not supported by googleVis, as you would have to pass on a JavaScript function, see the Google documentation for more details. Hence, you may have to post-porcess the output of gvisTreeMap, or create a template and write only the data into a separate file. The help file of print.gvis provides an example for this scenario.
I hope this helps.
Markus

bruno vidigal said...

Hi Akshay and Markus,

is it possible to make a tooltip with images for TreeMap using google dev api? I´m looking for how to make this in shiny app.

Post a Comment