Acinonyx
About Acinonyx
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About Acinonyx aka iPlots eXtreme
| What is Acinonyx |
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Acinonyx is the codename for the next generation of a high-performance interactive graphics system iPlots eXtreme. It is a continuation of the iPlots project, allowing visualization and exploratory analysis of large data. Due to its highly flexible design and focus on speed optimization, it can also be used as a general graphics system (e.g. it is the fastest R graphics device if you have a good GPU) and an interactive toolkit. It is a complete re-write of iPlots from scratch, taking the best from iPlots design and focusing on speed and flexibility.
The main focus compared to the previous iPlots project is on:
- speed and scalability to support large data (it uses OpenGL, optimized native code and object sharing to allow visualization of millions of datapoints).
- enhanced support for adding statistical models to plots with full interactivity
- seamless integration in GUIs (Windows and Mac OS X)
The project it currently in experimental stage (see known issues below), with a public access since the useR! 2009 meeting. An official release on CRAN is expected in September 2009 (the name for the new package is not decided yet).
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| What's new? |
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2008/06/02 - Acinonyx now has a custom webpage with details. The intended release timescale has been defined.
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| Installation |
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Acinonyx can be installed directly on Windows and Mac OS X in R 2.9.x simply using
install.packages("Acinonyx",,"http://rforge.net")
(Older R versions may work, too, but require you to compile it from sources)
Please read the "Known Issues" section first!
On other systems you must have OpenGL and GLUT installed and compile Acinonyx from sources using install.packages("Acinonyx",,"http://rforge.net",type="source") -- however, this setup is less well tested and your mileage may vary.
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| Documentation |
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One of the main reasons why Acinonyx is still experimental is the lack of documentation. If you have used iPlots before then you should find yourself at home in Acinonyx - most commands are the same. Just some general concepts -- Acinonyx relies more on the objective nature of plots, so you're better off saving the results of plot invocations -- you can do things like:
h = ihist(x) # create a histogram
...
h$bin.width = 5 # change the bin width programmatically
h$spines = TRUE # switch to spinogram
To use Acinonyx as the R graphics device (it's wicked fast if you have a good GPU), try
idev()
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| Known Issues |
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Acinonyx is currently under very active development, so a lot is planned for the future, but some things may not work yet. Before you get frustrated, please wait until the CRAN release unless you're willing to get dirty and test-drive the bleeding edge. Again, things are still rough, so expect blowups. Ok, here's the deal:
- Although the Acinonyx base is cross-platform, the main development platform is Mac OS X, so there things work the best.
- On Windows key mappings and modifiers don't work yet, text doesn't rotate and on some systems resizing causes flicker.
- On unix (except for OS X) platforms we use GLUT as the fall back, which is utterly untested. It may or may not work. We'll sort this out once the other issues have been fixed.
- Some basic plots are missing (boxplot, mosaic plots). Yes, we'll add them.
- When using Acinonyx graphics device, line parameters (lty, lmitre, ljoin) are ignored.
Please send feedback directly to me: simon.urbanek@r-project.org since this is too experimental to go on stats-rosuda-devel.
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