November 2020
Rep Plus V2.0 Development
07/11/20 11:13
Over the past year we have been working on major enhancements of Rep Plus that we plan to release in Version 2.
The planned enhancements are:-
64bit compilation for both OS X and Windows
One priority has been to develop a 64bit version that will be compatible with OS X Catalina, and will also be 64bit application under Windows. This version was released to testes some months ago and is now working successfully.
Improved security for WebGrid
WebGrid was designed to be open-architecture from its inception in 1993 so that it styling and functionality could be customized by its users and multimedia annotation of elements was supported.
This has been very successful over the years and is an important feature with those studying special communities, such as young children, where a simplified user interface, larger typefaces, and so on, are desirable.
Colleagues have also used the open-architecture features to integrate WebGrid with their own web applications in a seamless fashion.
However, some IT services have raised concerns about the capability to incorporate one's own HTML and CSS in WebGrid pages being used for malicious purposes.
Hence, in consultation with users, we have restricted HTML and CSS injection to filter out code that might be used to trick users into problematic situations.
In so doing, the techniques for customizing WebGrid have been simplified and become easier to explain so, hopefully, more users will be able to take advantage of the open architecture.
New grid analysis techniques
We have experimented with many grid analysis techniques but only issue those that are well-founded, appropriate to rating scale data, simple to enable those from whom grids have been elicited to gain greater understanding. One major objective has been to extend PrinGrid with clustering so that the relations between elements in the plots are more apparent, as they are in FOCUS. However, most standard clustering techniques we have implemented have resulted in a loss perspicuous plot.
In recent years Voronoi diagrams have become popular in the *conceptual spaces* research community. A Voronoi diagram divides a space of plotted locations into polygons enclosing each location such that each point within the polygon is closer to that location than to any other location. This provides a visual clustering on a principal components analysis that does not interfere with the original plot, is easy to understand, and provides new insights into the relations between the elements. It will be issued in Rep Plus 2.0 and is currently available on the WebGrid servers at the University of Victoria.
RepDoc and RepScript editors for Rep Plus text output and program scripts
RepDoc is a word processor that supports styled text, embedded images, style definitions, layout, pagination, printing and export to RTF. It enables text output from Rep Plus analyses to be fully styled and pasted into papers, reports, theses, and so on, with that styling. It allows the styles to be edited to conform with the requirements of a publisher, and graphic output and comments to be added to the document.
RepScript is a script editor for scripts in the RepScript language that formats and colours them to make their structures clear.
The planned enhancements are:-
64bit compilation for both OS X and Windows
One priority has been to develop a 64bit version that will be compatible with OS X Catalina, and will also be 64bit application under Windows. This version was released to testes some months ago and is now working successfully.
Improved security for WebGrid
WebGrid was designed to be open-architecture from its inception in 1993 so that it styling and functionality could be customized by its users and multimedia annotation of elements was supported.
This has been very successful over the years and is an important feature with those studying special communities, such as young children, where a simplified user interface, larger typefaces, and so on, are desirable.
Colleagues have also used the open-architecture features to integrate WebGrid with their own web applications in a seamless fashion.
However, some IT services have raised concerns about the capability to incorporate one's own HTML and CSS in WebGrid pages being used for malicious purposes.
Hence, in consultation with users, we have restricted HTML and CSS injection to filter out code that might be used to trick users into problematic situations.
In so doing, the techniques for customizing WebGrid have been simplified and become easier to explain so, hopefully, more users will be able to take advantage of the open architecture.
New grid analysis techniques
We have experimented with many grid analysis techniques but only issue those that are well-founded, appropriate to rating scale data, simple to enable those from whom grids have been elicited to gain greater understanding. One major objective has been to extend PrinGrid with clustering so that the relations between elements in the plots are more apparent, as they are in FOCUS. However, most standard clustering techniques we have implemented have resulted in a loss perspicuous plot.
In recent years Voronoi diagrams have become popular in the *conceptual spaces* research community. A Voronoi diagram divides a space of plotted locations into polygons enclosing each location such that each point within the polygon is closer to that location than to any other location. This provides a visual clustering on a principal components analysis that does not interfere with the original plot, is easy to understand, and provides new insights into the relations between the elements. It will be issued in Rep Plus 2.0 and is currently available on the WebGrid servers at the University of Victoria.
RepDoc and RepScript editors for Rep Plus text output and program scripts
RepDoc is a word processor that supports styled text, embedded images, style definitions, layout, pagination, printing and export to RTF. It enables text output from Rep Plus analyses to be fully styled and pasted into papers, reports, theses, and so on, with that styling. It allows the styles to be edited to conform with the requirements of a publisher, and graphic output and comments to be added to the document.
RepScript is a script editor for scripts in the RepScript language that formats and colours them to make their structures clear.