saveGIF() didn’t work when the option ani.dev is set to a function (thanks, @stla, #120 #121).
The ani.res option works for saveHTML() and saveVideo() now (thanks, @trevorld, #127 #129).
The ani.res option works for arbitrary graphical devices now (thanks, @trevorld, #135).
add a new option ani.res to ani.options(), to control the resolution of png, jepg, bmp and tiff images when using saveGIF() (#99).
saveGIF() and im.convert() now support converting using the ‘magick’ R package which does not require shelling out to external software.
saveGIF() on Windows might give an error message “the input line it too long” when the command to be passed to ImageMagick/GraphicsMagic is too long; now the command is quoted by double quotes (based on an answer to http://stackoverflow.com/q/682799/559676) (thanks, Aaron Dodd)
save*() functions should overwrite the output file (#50, #60).
the default value for the argument other.opts in saveVideo() was changed to ‘-pix_fmt yuv420p’ when the output format is MP4 (Skye Bender-deMoll, #49)
the defunct functions highlight.def(), write.rss() and ani.news() were finally removed from this package
the functions ani.start() and ani.stop() are defunct and will be removed in the next version of this package; please use saveHTML() instead
the animation option outdir in ani.options() was removed because it was confusing to many users that the output is in a temporary directory by default; now all files are written relative to the current working directory (#31)
the animation option convert in ani.options() is expected to be the path to ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick without quotes, i.e. not the shQuote() version (#35)
the animation option ‘htmlfile’ in ani.options() was removed, because it was only used in saveHTML() and g.brownian.motion(), and is not a general enough option
the ‘clean’ argument in saveVideo() was removed: images will be created in the temporary directory, and will not be explicitly cleaned (R will clean them then it quits)
datasets in this package are lazy loaded now, which means we no longer need, for example, data(pollen) – just use pollen
added an article in the articles/ directory of the package, which will be published in the Journal of Statistical Software; see citation(‘animation’)
x- and y-axis in the top scatter plot in boot.iid() are switched; now x-axis is the sample value and y-axis is the index
Rosling.bubbles() was rewritten to avoid .Internal() and the usage was slightly changed (see documentation)
demo(‘elephant’) to show a winking pink elephant; who said elephants cannot dance? (thanks, Neil Gunther)
all animations are using dev.hold() and dev.flush() now, so they will no longer flicker under Linux and Mac
saveGIF() and im.convert() returns the command for the conversion, which might be helpful for debugging. A note on the limit of ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick was added to the documentation of im.convert() (thanks, Florian Knorr)
fixed a typo in ?animation (imgname should be img.name; thanks, Neuwirth Erich)
ani.pause() gained an argument ‘interval’ to specify the time interval directly
for saveLatex(): when full.path = TRUE, will be replaced with / in the file path so that LaTeX can really find the animation file under Windows
ani.options() will perform a simple check on the validity of the options and issue warnings if the device and the file extension do not match, or the width and height for the pdf() device are greater than 100 inches
demo(‘IBM’) to show IBM stock closing prices from 2000 to 2010
ani.record() gained a new argument ‘replay.cur’, which can be helpful when we want to capture low-level plot changes without storing all the plots in memory (default behaviour of ani.record())
a new function saveVideo() to convert a sequence of images to a video using FFmpeg (thanks, Thomas Julou)
we can easily create an animation using Rweb now; see a demo in system.file(‘misc’, ‘Rweb’, ‘demo.html’, package = ‘animation’)
a new function qpdf() as a wrapper to the program ‘qpdf’, which is mainly used to compress the PDF files (it is recommended over Pdftk)
saveLatex() gained a new argument ‘full.path’: when the animation frames are not in the same directory with the LaTeX document, we can set full.path = TRUE to ensure LaTeX can find the image files
grad.desc() gained two new arguments: ‘gr’ to provide the gradient function, and ‘main’ to specify to title of the plot (thanks, Zeno Adams)
clt.ani() gained two arguments ‘mean’ and ‘sd’ to draw the theoretical limiting distribution
a new demo(‘ggobi_animation’) to show how to record GGobi plots as an animation in the HTML file
saveSWF() puts all the image frames into the temp dir instead of ani.options(‘outdir’) (similar to saveGIF())
the location of the argument ‘img.name’ was moved to the 3rd place in saveSWF() to be consistent to other saveXXX() functions
clt.ani() gained a new argument ‘xlim’ to set the x-axis limit of the histogram
knn.ani() gained the … argument to pass additional arguments to create the empty “frame” for the animation
demo(‘Xmas_card’) contributed by Yuan Huang
demo(‘flowers’) to show how to download images from the Internet and create an animation
a new function pdftk() as a wrapper to call the Pdftk toolkit (mainly for compressing PDF graphics output)
saveLatex(), saveSWF() and saveMovie() can compress the PDF graphics using Pdftk (if available) now; if ani.options(‘ani.type’) is ‘pdf’ and the ‘pdftk’ option is set, these functions will try the compression first
new functions ani.record() and ani.replay() to record and replay the animations; they can be used to capture the changes in the graphics made by low-level plotting commands (see ?ani.record for examples)
a new demo ‘Xmas2’: Merry Christmas with snowflakes (see demo(‘Xmas2’, ‘animation’); thanks, Jing Jiao)
a new function saveHTML() to insert animations into HTML pages (this was designed to replace the old ani.start() and ani.stop(); the output is much more appealing; the JavaScript is based on the SciAnimator library and jQuery)
ani.options() gained a new option ‘autoplay’ to indicate whether to autoplay the animation in the HTML page created by saveHTML()
in fact ani.options() was rewritten, but this should not have any influence on users; the usage is the same
ani.options() gained a new option ‘use.dev’ to decide whether to use the graphics device provided in ani.options(‘ani.dev’) when calling saveHTML(), saveLatex(), saveMovie() and saveSWF()
ani.options() has a couple of hidden options (‘convert’, ‘swftools’, ‘img.fmt’) which can be useful too; see ?ani.options for details
a new function ani.pause(): it is a wrapper to Sys.sleep(interval) but it will not pause when called in a non-interactive graphics device (usually the off-screen devices); this is the recommended way to specify the pause in the animation now – all the functions in this package have been adjusted to use ani.pause()
a new demo(‘pollen’) to show the hidden ‘structure’ in a large data (requires the rgl package)
a new demo(‘CLEvsLAL’) to `replay’ the NBA game between CLE and LAL on 2009 Christmas (with a new dataset ‘CLELAL09’)
a new demo(‘fireworks’) to set fireworks using R (thanks, Weicheng Zhu)
saveLatex() can work with the rgl package to produce 3D animations in a PDF document now; see demo(‘rgl_animation’)
a new demo(‘rgl_animation’) to demonstrate how to insert rgl 3D animations into a LaTeX document and compile to PDF
a new demo(‘use_Cairo’) to show how to use the Cairo device in this package to obtain high-quality output
a new demo(‘Sweave_animation’) to show how to insert animations into Sweave documents
a new demo(‘game_of_life’) to demonstrate the (amusing) Game of Life (thanks, Linlin Yan)
the documentation of this package has been tremendously revised; hopefully it is more clear to read now
several arguments in saveMovie(), im.convert(), saveSWF() and saveLatex() were removed, because they can be specified by ani.options(); this can simplify the usage of these functions
the argument ‘para’ in saveMovie() was removed; the argument ‘ani.first’ was also removed from all the save*() functions, because this can be written in ‘expr’ and there is no need to provide an additional argument
the path of the output in im.convert() and gm.convert() will be quoted, because sometimes users might supply a path containing spaces (thanks, Phalkun Chheng)
the option ‘filename’ in ani.options() was renamed to ‘htmlfile’ so that the meaning of this option is more clear; ‘footer’ was renamed to ‘verbose’ too
ani.options() can accept any arguments now
im.convert() and gm.convert() will no longer stop() when the convert utility cannot be found; instead, they only issue warnings; a hidden option ani.options(‘convert’) can be used to specify the location of convert.exe in ImageMagick
saveMovie(), saveHTML(), saveSWF() and saveLatex() will try to open the output if ani.options(‘autobrowse’) is TRUE; and they will keep the current working directory untouched when evaluating ‘expr’ (i.e. ‘expr’ will be evaluated under getwd())
the package has a NAMESPACE now (so .First.lib was changed to .onLoad accordingly)
im.convert() and gm.convert() can accept a vector of time intervals now (i.e. the time interval between image frames does not have to be a constant any more)
added a dataset ‘iatemp’ (yearly average temperature of central Iowa)
saveLatex() can be used in Sweave to dynamically insert PDF animations now – it will automatically detect if it was called in Sweave and output the relevant LaTeX code to the LaTeX document
the package is now maintained on GitHub (https://github.com/yihui/animation) and using roxygen to document functions
the functions highlight.def(), write.rss() and tidy.source() were defunct because they are irrelevant
ani.news() was removed from the package; we can use news(package = ‘animation’) instead
the MASS package is imported instead of being attached; in fact only lda() in MASS is used in the animation package.
fixed a buglet in saveMovie(): outdir does not actually work.
im.convert() will try to open the output using the default application in the OS (e.g. using command ‘xdg-open’, or ‘open’)
demo(‘jumpingHorse’) shows a horse jumping on the chess board (contributed by Linlin Yan)
A new function im.convert() which comes from saveMovie() but serves as a more general- purpose function; it can convert a series of files (not necessarily produced in R) to GIF/MPEG, and tries its best to find ImageMagick automatically (even you only have LyX installed) Thanks, Kelvin Lam.
saveMovie() gained a new argument ‘fileext’ to specify the file extension of the image frames (the old approach to get the file ext is not appropriate if we use other graphics devices, e.g. Cairo); meanwhile, saveMovie() now uses im.convert() to convert images to an animation file.
saveMovie() now generate the image frames in a temp directory and output the animation to the working directory by default (thanks, Thomas Julou)
demo(‘hanoi’) will demonstrate the Tower of Hanoi game (contributed by Linlin Yan)
A new function sample.ratio() to demonstrate the advantage of ratio estimation in sampling survey. (thanks, Amber Watkins)
added a note for the function newton.method() that the argument ‘FUN’ needs to be defined without braces. (thanks, Peter Ehlers)
fixed a bug in saveLatex(): the frame number should start with 0 instead of 1. (thanks, Taiyun)
improved the way to find ‘convert’ for saveMovie() under Windows which is a long-lasting confusing problem for Windows users (thanks, Yishuo Deng)
fixed a bug caused by the ‘outdir’ option in ani.options() when ‘outdir’ is a relative path which makes ani.stop() fail (thanks, Paul Murrell)
three demos to illustrate recursion added: see demo(‘recur.leaf’), demo(‘recur.snow’) and demo(‘recur.tree’); thanks, Taiyun!
demo(‘Xmas’) added
fixed a bug for the option ‘interval’: in the non-interactive environment, ani.start() and ani.stop() should use ani.options()$interval to obtain the REAL ‘interval’ (other than 0)
a new argument ‘install.animate’ for saveLatex() to install the LaTeX ‘animate’ if it does not exist
a new argument ‘width.cutoff’ for tidy.source() to decide the width of deparsed code
removed the code to install ImageMagick in saveMovie()
changed shell() to system() in saveMovie() (thanks, R. Woodrow Setzer)
updated the LaTeX package ‘animate’
a new function MC.hitormiss() to demonstrate the ‘hit or miss’ Monte Carlo integration
a new function MC.samplemean() to demonstrate the ‘sample mean’ Monte Carlo integration
a new function price.ani() to demonstrate the stock prices changing within a time span (inspired by Shen Dai)
saveLatex() to embed the animation into a LaTeX document (with LaTeX package ‘animate’).
a new option ‘imgdir’ added to ani.options() so that users can specify the name of the image directory
a message will come up if the animation option ‘nmax’ is changed; this will help users know the actual number of images in the current session; this message will only show in interactive mode
saveMovie() will try to install ImageMagick automatically if ‘convert’ not found
query ani.options(‘interval’) will return 0 if the animation is run in a non-interactive mode; this will save much time typically in ‘R CMD check’ (Thanks to Prof Ripley)
the option ‘nmax’ will be adjusted to the actual number of images in the directory ani.options(‘imgdir’), because sometimes the actual number of images does not equal to ani.options(‘nmax’)
shortened the descriptions in Rd files and several changes in documentations
fixed several buglets in ani.stop()
changed the ‘while’ loop to ‘for’ loop in brownian.motion(); this will shorten the code by two lines
ani.options(‘ani.dev’) can be the name of a function (character), e.g. “png”
moving.block() to plot a subset of data by blocks
ani.options() gained a new argument ‘loop’ to control the iteration of the animation in an HTML page: TRUE to interate for infinite times, and FALSE not to interate (only play once). Thanks, Marcin Kozak!
new demo ‘Sierpinski’ for Sierpinski triangle; see demo(Sierpinski).
ani.options(‘footer’) was changed to allow a custom string to be written in the HTML page as the footer information. (Thanks, Jorge Nieves)
The famous ‘pollen’ data added. See the example for finding the letters hidden in the data.
A function quincunx() added to simulate the Galton box or Bean Machine. (Thanks for the inspiration from Roger Koenker)
A function least.squares() added to show the ordinary least square process. (Thanks for the inspiration from Daniel Goldstein)
A function BM.circle() added to show the Brownian Motion in a circle.
A function g.brownian.motion() added to demonstrate the Brownian Motion using Google Visulization API.
The Shapiro-Wilk normality tests are performed to independent sample means instead of the original ‘cumulative’ data. (Thanks, Duncan Murdoch)
Arguments ‘col.contour’ and ‘col.arrow’ added to grad.desc() to specify the colors for the contour lines and arrows freely; the graphical parameters are no longer specified within the function using par().
The path of SWF Tools in saveSWF() will be quoted by shQuote() instead of dQuote(). (Thanks, zhoulvjun)
The package has provided a wrapper to produce Flash animations using SWF Tools: saveSWF()
A demo ‘wordrotation’ added to show the basic method to make animations. More demos will be added in future releases.
ani.options() added to control animation parameters. It is much better than ani.control() in previous versions.
ani.start() and ani.stop() are modified. The former function opens a graphics device and the latter one create an HTML page with a new interface.
A wiki has been build to support this package: http://animation.yihui.org (AniWiki: Animations in Statistics)
Graphical parameters can be set in … argument for: brownian.motion(), buffon.needle(), clt.ani(), conf.int(), cv.ani(), lln.ani(), mwar.ani(), newton.method(), sample.cluster(), sample.strat().
P-values are computed in clt.ani() to check the normality (using ‘shapiro.test()’).
The vignette is abandoned and stopped being updated; the wiki http://animation.yihui.org will be used instead.
The way to create HTML animations is significantly changed for the sake of a better interface and more flexible control of animations. Read the help files for ani.control(), ani.start(), ani.stop().
The function savePNG() removed. The new way to create animation frames allows ANY graphics devices.
ani.control() and checkargs() removed. The new way to control animation parameters is more flexible.
A rectangular grid has been added to the plot in kmeans.ani() so that the moving of centers can be better observed.
The default value for the argument “source” is set to be “clipboard”.
conf.int() to illustrate the concept of confidence intervals.
lln.ani() to illustrate the Law of Large Numbers.
grad.desc() for the Gradient Descent Algorithm.
bisection.method() for the illustration of the Bisection method.
newton.method() for the demonstration of Newton-Raphson method.
A special function checkargs() is added to validate animation arguments, which can promote the efficiency of animation functions.
It doesn’t need Sys.sleep() when creating HTML pages, so the code is modified to avoid suspending in this case.
cli.ani() to illustrate the Centrol Limit Theorem (CLT).
vi.grid.illusion() to illustrate two kinds of grid illusions (Scintillating grid illusion and Hermann grid illusion).
write.rss() for creating RSS feed files from a CSV file containing RSS items.
vi.lilac.chaser() for the visual illusion ‘Lilac Chaser’.
The capability of PNG device is checked before creating png image files in savePNG().
A bug in the assigning of ‘interval’ in the environment ‘ANIenv’ was fixed.
A new function highlight.def() added to dynamically generate the R definition file for the software Highlight.
mwar.ani() to show moving window auto-regression.
sample.simple() for simple random sampling without replacement.
sample.strat() for stratified sampling.
sample.cluster for cluster sampling.
sample.system() for systematic sampling.
The string ‘file://’ was added before the path of the HTML animation page to avoid the error caused by browseURL in ani.stop().
File ‘ANI.css’ and ‘FUN.js’ were moved to the directory ‘js’ (because they are not ‘data’). Both files were modified slightly.
The parameter for time interval can be passed to the HTML animation page now.
The vignette was supplemented and modified accordingly.
An argument ‘col’ added to flip.coin() to control colors of each face of the coin.
The ‘pageview’ data updated to Dec 3, 2007.
Points that have already been classified in knn.ani() are marked out in later steps of classification for the rest points.
The values of PI are silently returned in buffon.needle().
The result for the test set can be returned in knn.ani().
The computation for kfcv() is changed so that the sample sizes will be more ‘uniformly’ allocated.
A new function ani.control() added so that the controlling parameters can be more uniform and the scalability of the animation functions will also be better. All the animation functions are chanaged accordingly.
A news-reading function ani.news() added so that changes will be conveniently known.
boot.iid() is available for demonstration of bootstrapping i.i.d data.
The arguments … is added in animation functions to control PNG image files.
The sample data is permuted before cv.ani() so that every time we do cross-validation, the splitting of trainig set and test set will change (instead of splitting 1:n into k parts). The tick marks of x-axis will change accordingly.
ani.start() to start an HTML page for animations.
ani.stop() to complete the HTML animation page.
brownian.motion() to demonstrate Brownian motion in the 2D plane.
buffon.needle() to simulate the process of Buffon’s needle.
cv.ani() to demonstrate k-fold cross validation.
flip.coin() to simulate tossing ‘coins’.
kfcv() to compute sample sizes for k-fold cross-validation.
kmeans.ani() to show the process of K-Means cluster analysis.
knn.ani() to show k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm.
savePNG() to save PNG image files which constitute the basic animation frames in the HTML page.
tidy.source() is a trivial function to ‘tidy up’ R code using the internal R function parse().
‘pageview’ is a daily page view data of my personal website.