Weekly update 15

This week I've actually had a fair chunk of time to spend on my dissertation. I've been using that time to rejigger some of the code in my GIS tool. Essentially I am trying to transition some code that was written poorly and would be hard for others to extend into something that would be fairly easy for future groups using the tool in other locations to add to or change. To do so, I have moved a lot of the workings of this part of the tool into two separate spreadsheets. Namely, I have one spreadsheet where the user can modify the default metrics (cost and impact) being calculated by the tool as well as (and this is the important part) any preprocessing of datasets that needs to be done for that metric before the tool runs. In addition to the spreadsheet, there are now directories dedicated to custom functions for calculating metrics and their preprocessing steps. It is kind of an intermediate level of work to customize the tool in this way. And that's exactly where it needs to be.

That was incredibly boring. Here's a picture of the current draft user interface (not made by me, but by Dan Mahr at Cadmus)

ooooooo Shiny