Ramnath Vaidyanathan just released his new R interactive package, rMaps (Vaidyanathan, 2014). The packages relies on the development version of his widely known rCharts package (Vaidyanathan, 2013) as well as javascript libraries that specialize in maps. If you don’t know Ramnath, he is one of the most active R developers out there!! You can see that from his GitHub profile.

The package is very new and still under development, but I bet that Ramnath released it to get us users excited and maybe find some helpful hands to document it and further develop it.

I don’t know about you, but I surely got excited about the package from his intro video:

It’s a simple screen cast with good music.

In the GitHub rMaps repository you can find the simple installation instructions as well as three different examples. They all work if you run them in the latest version of RStudio otherwise you might run into a couple minor hiccups like I did.

Just to get you excited, this is the third example where you can easily add markers with pop ups.

suppressMessages(library("rMaps"))

map <- Leaflet$new()
map$setView(c(51.505, -0.09), zoom = 13)
map$tileLayer(provider = "Stamen.Watercolor")
map$marker(c(51.5, -0.09), bindPopup = "Hi. I am a popup")
map

You can view the interactive version of the example here -- I'm sure that a feature will be added later to make it easy to share the maps you make.

Overall, I think that this is a great start and I look forward to using it. For now, don't be discouraged with the lack of documentation. I'm sure that if you ask nicely Ramnath will answer asap!

References

Citations made with knitcitations (Boettiger, 2014).

• Carl Boettiger, (2014) knitcitations: Citations for knitr markdown files. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=knitcitations
• Ramnath Vaidyanathan, (2013) rCharts: Interactive Charts using Polycharts.js.
• Ramnath Vaidyanathan, (2014) rMaps: Interactive Maps from R.

Reproducibility

sessionInfo()

## R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)
## 
## locale:
## [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] rMaps_0.1           knitcitations_0.5-0 bibtex_0.3-6       
## [4] knitr_1.5          
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] codetools_0.2-8    digest_0.6.4       evaluate_0.5.1    
##  [4] formatR_0.10       grid_3.0.2         httr_0.2          
##  [7] lattice_0.20-24    plyr_1.8           rCharts_0.4.2     
## [10] RColorBrewer_1.0-5 RCurl_1.95-4.1     RJSONIO_1.0-3     
## [13] stringr_0.6.2      tools_3.0.2        whisker_0.3-2     
## [16] XML_3.95-0.2       xtable_1.7-1       yaml_2.1.10

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