On procastination and bitmap gganimate

Posted on 4 mins read

With the Joint International Society for Clinical Biostatisitcs and Australian Statistical Conference 2018 approaching where I am presenting a poster, giving a poster pitch, giving a talk, delivering a seminar at R-Ladies Melbourne meeting as well as continuing collaborations, I think it’s no time for procastination. I have to get things done.

Then this happened.

And this was me. The idiot.

I was yet to join the gganimate user group so I was quite excited to have an excuse to give it a try. I first had to install the gganimate package. I had the old version of the package by David Robinson. Thomas Lin Perdensen has been developing the package with David’s blessings and showcased the package at the useR! 2018 conference held in Brisbane, Australia. His talk on “The Grammar of Animation” was well received (at the very least by me).

David not long after the useR! 2018 accepted fully Thomas’s pull request and transferred the ownership. Here here to the new king of gganimate! Now I just want segues.

Anyhow, installing was quite a bit of pain. First issue I had was installing the dependency gifski. After some time trying, I figured out that it was having issue finding an element to do with the R core algorithm. It then clicked to me that my version of R (v3.3) was old. I delayed updating as I was afraid certain packages may break. I decided to take the risk and installed the latest R (v3.5.1). Then gifski installed fine. Next I had to reinstall other dependencies tweenr and transformr. Both are Thomas’s packages. I managed to install tweenr from CRAN but for transformr I had to install it from github. This is where I hit the next installation issue.

Could not find build tools necessary

I had a lot of trouble figuring this out. I reinstalled some developer tools for Mac. Still getting the same error. It should be working but it seems to be failing somewhere.

The trick to bypass this part was to bypass the building tool check by

options(buildtools.check = function(action) TRUE )

then everything worked fine.

Bitmap gganimate

So to get started, I needed to get a bitmap matrix for the words ‘R Ladies’ and ‘Sydney’. The easiest way I figured was to draw this and read it in R. So I download and installed Paintbrush.

I copied the style ‘R Ladies’ from the orignal and ‘Sydney’ was made from another styled bitmap with some improvising.

With some googling to find out which one might be the best for reading it in as bitmap and with the help of this tutorial, I got the code working and put it as my first github gist:

And it was done :)

I learned a lot so thank you for the challenge!

So I go sweating to get my work done.

Yup, that’s right.

You can tell I’m procastinating again writing this blog.

I might learn one day.

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