While R packagers have a lot to be proud of in the graphics packages of R, the truth of the matter is that the lack of GUI even for Graphical Analysis hinders the ease of usage in adopting R’s powerful graphics for statistical analysis. As a contrast , SAS and JMP have been combined together in the SAS Visual Data Discovery Environment
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I really liked the GUI of JMP ( which is very rich in stats testing) and with the powerful data handling capabilities on the desktop of SAS, this is clearly an outstanding effort to create terrific graphics ( see below)
Note the combination of the two- Great Graphics WITH a GUI. in R the GUI that comes closest to matching JMP is R Commander, but it’s graphical capabilities are kept basic as it is not meant for replacement of the beloved Kommand prompt
( maybe an expanded plugin for graphics or hexabin would help)
It would be interesting to see an on demand Ec2 cloud hosted version of visual data discovery by SAS (with JMP as the front end) even for a limited pilot of six months and targeted at the SMB segment. Or a Salesforce.com application that integrates Salesforce.com data with the tests and standard procedures in SAS and JMP.
Note of Discontent- The JMP Website is terrible. It has a different font from the SAS Website ( they could atleast use the same CSS ) and overall is the worst part of the otherwise excellently elegant JMP. Hope they upgrade their website soon ( they havent done it this year atleast).
Scrennshot Citation-
http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/statistics/datadiscovery/index.html
DECISION STATS 