Re:Why I use ggplot2
by minimaxir on Friday February 12, 2016 @02:21PM
(#11089725)
A somewhat off topic note: that gganimate GIF is 3.5 MB, which is a very large file for a image that is not central to the argument!
That's one of the reasons I was dissuaded from making GIFs from my ggplot2 charts, and it's why I created a Convert Frames to GIF tool (https://github.com/minimaxir/frames-to-gif-osx) to create higher-quality GIFs at manageable file sizes. (the first example GIF in my repo is about the same number of frames and resolution as the OP's GIF, but 1/7th of the filesize, of course due to the nature of GIFs this is not a straight comparison) That said, gganimate does sound like an interesting tool, and certainly much better than the animation package alone.
The killer feature of ggplot2 that cannot easily be replicated in any GUI program is indeed faceting. There are also other geoms that are hard to do in base R/excel are things, like contour maps and native smoothed regression lines (with confidence intervals!)
That's one of the reasons I was dissuaded from making GIFs from my ggplot2 charts, and it's why I created a Convert Frames to GIF tool (https://github.com/minimaxir/frames-to-gif-osx) to create higher-quality GIFs at manageable file sizes. (the first example GIF in my repo is about the same number of frames and resolution as the OP's GIF, but 1/7th of the filesize, of course due to the nature of GIFs this is not a straight comparison) That said, gganimate does sound like an interesting tool, and certainly much better than the animation package alone.
The killer feature of ggplot2 that cannot easily be replicated in any GUI program is indeed faceting. There are also other geoms that are hard to do in base R/excel are things, like contour maps and native smoothed regression lines (with confidence intervals!)