Hi, I'm Dean

R-Shiny Expert / Software Tool Builder / Extreme Traveller

Hi, I'm Dean

R-Shiny Expert / Software Tool Builder / Extreme Traveller

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Plot Colour Helper - Finally an easy way to pick colours for your R plots!

Posted on January 9, 2017

You’ve just made an amazing plot in R, and the only thing remaining is finding the right colours to use. Arghhh this part is never fun… You’re probably familiar with this loop: try some colour values -> plot -> try different colours -> plot -> repeat. Don’t you wish there... [Read More]

How to write a useful htmlwidgets in R: tips and walk-through a real example

Posted on October 18, 2016

I’d like to share some tips and recommendations on building htmlwidgets, based on my own learning experience while creating timevis. These tips are mostly concerned with making your htmlwidget more useful and user friendly. In this post, every tip I provide will be followed by an actual code... [Read More]

Shiny tips & tricks for improving your apps and solving common problems

Posted on August 29, 2016

This document contains a collection of various Shiny tricks that I commonly use or that I know many people ask about. Each link contains a complete functional Shiny app that demonstrates how to perform a non trivial task in Shiny. The complete up-to-date list of tips, along with all the... [Read More]

Visualizing when I'm most productive during the day

Analyzing my (and others') git activity

Posted on August 19, 2016

Click here to explore the data yourself Yesterday I saw this retweet from @timelyportfolio that links to a gist by @gka. The gist gave a few short scripts that can show you when your git commits take place during the day. I thought... [Read More]

addinslist package: An RStudio addin to discover and install RStudio addins

Posted on May 9, 2016

RStudio addins were released in early 2016 to provide anyone with the ability to add “extensions” to RStudio. This feature has quickly become popular, but discoverability was a problem: there was just no easy way to know what addins exist. To address that issue, one month ago I created... [Read More]

Need any more reason to love R-Shiny? Here: you can even use Shiny to create simple games!

Posted on January 26, 2016

TL;DR Click here to play a puzzle game written entirely in Shiny (source code). Anyone who reads my blog posts knows by now that I’m very enthusiastic about Shiny (the web app framework for R - if you didn’t know what Shiny is then I suggest reading my... [Read More]

ezknitr: R package to avoid the typical working directory pain when using knitr

Posted on December 9, 2015

A new package has hit the CRAN shelves this week. While knitr is one of the most useful R packages in existence, ezknitr is a simple extension to it that adds flexibility in several ways. One common source of frustration with knitr is that it assumes the... [Read More]

Building Shiny apps - an interactive tutorial

Posted on December 7, 2015

If you use this material in a classroom, I’d appreciate if you link back to my site! If you want tutoring/training in Shiny or need help with building a Shiny app, I’m available for hire. Shiny is a package from RStudio that can be used to build... [Read More]

Persistent data storage in Shiny apps

Posted on July 1, 2015

This article is also published on RStudio’s Shiny Articles Shiny apps often need to save data, either to load it back into a different session or to simply log some information. However, common methods of storing data from R may not work well with Shiny. Functions like... [Read More]

Shiny finally has a colour picker - use colourInput to select colours in Shiny apps

Posted on June 28, 2015

NOTE: the colour input described here is no longer part of shinyjs and is now available in the colourpicker package instead. I don’t always think Shiny is missing anything, but when I do - I fill in the gap myself. That was meant to be read... [Read More]