Abstract

Shiny gadgets, RStudio addins, and HTML templates are a new tools that help analysts improve their work.

Shiny gadgets are interactive tools that enhance your R programming experience. They can be invoked as a function and return values in the course of an analysis. For example, analysts can use gadgets to manually select outliers from a plot or input a password so it isn’t captured in the history. Shiny gadgets are built using the new miniUI package, a package which allows you to build apps for small screens.

RStudio addins is a mechanism for integrating custom R functions and gadgets into the RStudio IDE. Addins are built and shared as R packages. Addins rely on the rstudioapi package which allows your code to interact with the IDE. For example, analysts can use addins to format their R code, interactively build new code, or mutate an open document. The sky is the limit.

HTML Templates allows you to leverage existing HTML templates when designing your shiny user interface. Shiny UI elements can easily be inserted directly into the body of an HTML document. This can be helpful when you want the appearance of your apps to fit into your current organization or when just want to make your app attractive without spending a lot of time and effort.

Bio

Nathan Stephens recently joined RStudio as director of solutions engineering. His background is in applied analytics and consulting. He has experience building data science teams, creating innovative data products, analyzing big data, and architecting analytic platforms. He was an early adopter of R and has introduced it into many organizations. Nathan holds an MS in statistics from Brigham Young University.