[R] R on Mobile Devices (Android)

[Gustaf Rydevik]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com> wrote:
> Harsh wrote:
>>
>> At the cost of sounding far-fetched and almost incredulous, I would
>> like to know if any R user is remotely considering the use of R on
>> Mobile devices, and Android in particular.
>
> In addition to the other objections in the other replies, I add this one:
> the assignment operator and the parens are up on ALT keys on the Android
> keyboard.  Typing R expressions would be pretty painful.
>
> You can demo this by installing an ssh client and logging in remotely to a
> machine with R on it, and trying to use it remotely.  A local one wouldn't
> be better...it might not even be faster, because the faster CPU on the
> machine running R might matter more than the speed of the network link
> between client and server.
>
> I briefly thought of what it would take to port R to an iPhone or iPod
> touch, and the keyboard issues would be even worse.
>
> Bottom line, R has the idiom of a real keyboard written into its bones.  To
> be popular, a statistical analysis tool for such devices would have to work
> differently, taking advantage of the platform's native input mechanisms.

Just a note on porting to iPhone:
the iPhone keyboard can be customised for specific applications, so
you could make a keyboard with assignment and brackets prominently
displayed. I'm thinking that interface-wise this would be fairly
doable.
Unfortunately, I believe running R on the iPhone wouldn't be allowed.
The sdk states:

"3.3.2 [...]No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in
an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's
Published APIs and built-
in interpreter(s)."
and

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code
by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plugin
architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise."


I'm not too familiar with programming speech, but it seems this would
cover R, no?

Otherwise, I might be interested in porting R, taking it as an excuse
to learn objective C and C++....

regards,

Gustaf


-- 
Gustaf Rydevik, M.Sci.
tel: +46(0)703 051 451
address:Essingetorget 40,112 66 Stockholm, SE
skype:gustaf_rydevik