The idea of 'Visual Abstracts' have recently become popular and are particularly efficient in distilling the main findings of original research.
I wanted to create an application that enabled users (or non programmers in general) to create nice visual summaries for their research projects they could share over social media. I've added a fair bit of control and customization in the application mostly related to layout to aesthetics.
Technical pieces:
-uses 'rintrojs' to orient users to the application
-combination of renderUI + ggplot2 are at the heart of the application
-bookmarking enabled - users can save and resume the creation of their graphics at a later time
-a downloadable pdf option
-a downloadable png option
A few users of the app made the comment that it would be helpful to be able to save your progress (especially since shinyapps.io will time out after 15 minutes automatically). I looked into how difficult this would be to manually implement and in my search came across bookmarking. An awesome feature!
Both the shinyapps deployment and the Rstudio Cloud project have been updated.