I have been meaning for some time to get stuck into the rCharts package which provides
an interface to many Javascript graphic libraries. These offer rich charting capabilities with interactivity and a great deal of customization.

As regular readers will know, I am also interested in improved publicity for CRAN packages, although the Shiny app I developed needs a bit of attention!

So I was delighted when RStudio decided to release daily logs of downloads from their CRAN mirror. It seems as though I am not alone in this, as there have already been several blog posts including a Top 100 of 2013 with some nice graphs from Tal Galili and maps from James Cheshire and Ramnath Vaidyanathan . Of course, this is only one of about 90 CRAN mirrors so
there is no way to be sure it reflects total usage but the usual suspects top the charts

As it happens, Ramnath is the prime mover behind rCharts and he and fellow contributor, Thomas Reinholdsson, have held my hand in the development of a Shiny CRAN Downloads app. The charts included are based on the sophisticated Highcharts library which offers elegant presentation, zoom capability and interactivity including customizable tool-tips and click events, which I have used to link to the relevant package pdf.

Users can select one or more packages or countries and get a chart showing activity in terms of total downloads, rank or percent. In addition, there are tables showing both the Top Tens by week since November 2012 and record achievements in terms of ranking and downloads. Shiny, for example, achieved its highest ranking position of 70 last week as it topped the 1000 downloads from this mirror for the first time

The code, with a limited set of the data, is available as a gist. Or load shiny and runGist(’5832902′) to view

So give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

I’m planning to keep it updated each Monday
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