This week in R (2025-02-07)

Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:

• Conference calls: There are some big R conferences coming up this year which you should be aware of. The deadline for submitting talks to posit::conf(2025) is next Friday on 14th February, as is the submission deadline for Cascadia R Conf. Abstract submission deadline for ShinyConf 2025 is this Sunday (9th February). For EARL 2025 you have until the 28th February and for useR! 2025 you have a bit longer to submit - until 3rd March. Early bird tickets are available for most of these and you can check out Jumping Rivers' list for a more thorough collection of all upcoming R conferences.
• The R-mobile: ThinkR have released a mobile app that runs R! Rlinguo is available on both iOS and Android, and uses the {webR} technology to run R on mobile. The app is fairly simple for now, and as the name suggests is based on a Duolinguo-style question and answer game, but it is an interesting experiment building on what is now possible in 2025 with R. This article explains why they decided to develop the app.
• Build the brand: {bslib} 0.9.0 has been released and brings brand.yml to Shiny for R! The exciting new framework from Posit for consistent branding and theming across apps and documents has been available in Shiny for Python and Quarto for a few months now. This latest development means that it is now easier than ever to keep consistent branding across all your apps and documents.
• {watcher}s on the wall: a new R package has been released to CRAN, which wraps the 'libsfwatch' file system monitoring library. The package can be used for asynchronously watching for file changes in the most efficient way across all operating systems. Read more about it here.
• Link it all in: Dr Mowinckel has written an article explaining how to successfully interact with the LinkedIn API from R. The post describes the difficulties in doing so and common pitfalls to avoid - a very useful read if you have ever thought about automating interactions with LinkedIn.

• Did you know:?the following is 'syntactically valid' R code...credit (/blame) goes to Emil Hvitfeld!

`  ` <- `*`
`   ` <- 2
`    ` <- `  `(`   `, `   `)
`     ` <- `  `(`   `, `    `)

`     `/`    `
#> [1] 2        

New versions:

• {mirai} v2.1.0 - bug fixes and feature improvements ahead of an exciting integration into a very popular package (more on this in future weeks)...

• {ordbetareg} 0.8.0 - some new features for this statistical package.

I post updates like this every week so if you're interested feel free to follow. Comment below if there's something interesting you found out this week too!