1) Add a new screen resolution to com.apple.Boot.plist as per How to Increase Mac OS X Snow Leopard Virtual Machine Screen Resolution on VirtualBox and VMware using Method #1 (but not from the /Extra folder – from the next bit):

2) Make screen resolution available from VirtualBox end as per Notes on setting 1680×1050 resolution on a Snow Leopard inside a VirtualBox

And here is the result – a much more pleasant experience of testing SOFA on the Mac platform.

Next goal is to get some tricky graphics libraries I need working on the Mac.

Version 1.3.3 also lets you sort by category labels in clustered bar charts, line charts, area charts and box plots. Area charts can also be sorted ascending or descending by count/mean/sum.

The series and category are now displayed in tooltips e.g. Italy, 20-29 for clustered bar charts, multi-series line charts, and box plots. This is especially helpful when there are lots of categories and/or series.

• Improved statistics output footnotes.
• Borders on bar-type charts are now optional. This can be useful when bars are very short.
• Chi square clustered bar charts can cope with higher default limits for number of values.
• Importing field names with more than 90 characters prohibited at the point of import rather than causing problems later.
• The group by max number of values is now controlled by a single my_globals setting (making it easier to override).
• The default settings for some remaining max values have been increased.

There was one minor bug-fix this version – line charts now cope better with lots of categories (increased padding around max label width in overall width calculations).

And a problem with the deb installer was also fixed.

Here is the full list of improvements:

• Adding sum as an option for charting e.g. a line chart showing total income per month by product. And the interface has been simplified at the same time.
• Matplotlib scatterplots now have optimal min and max settings calculated for their x-axis.
• Added footnote to Wilcoxon output explaining that different statistics packages may report the test statistic differently.
• Misc fixes to chart layout including left margin offset.
• Easier to add new variable definition files from within dialog for choosing them.
• Modified recode column labels and help content to reduce confusion about which columns to enter range information into.

And bug fixes:

• Fixed code picking optimal min and max axis values for scatterplots and box plots to cope when value range is much smaller than gap to 0.
• CSV import now copes with new lines inside fields when gathering data for sample display.
• Extra settings for Line Charts now display when they should even if only changing data type.
• Fixed bug which allowed line breaks in field names.

You might be able to help. If you are a Mac user, and you are able to get either of the following libraries working on your machine, please drop me a line (grant@sofastatistics.com) letting me know how you did it.

• Ghostscript (used to convert PDF → PNG)
• ImageMagick (used to trim PNG to correct dpi) or, even better still, PythonMagick

More good news for the SOFA Statistics project – CUBRID recently donated $300 to SOFA Statistics. CUBRID is “a comprehensive open source relational database management system highly optimized for Web Applications” and SOFA recently added a plug-in to connect to CUBRID databases.

It was also great to see the support that CUBRID gave to a range of other projects. One of the interesting things was the range of countries represented: New Zealand (SOFA Statistics), Switzerland, South Korea, Kenya, Russia, Australia, Denmark, Romania, China, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the USA. Truly a global effort.

So on behalf of the SOFA project, thanks

In addition to the trophy and framed certificate I was lucky to get a nice new Android tablet from Zareason (http://zareason.com/shop/zatab.html). Busy playing with that at the moment.

And SOFA was also a finalist for the Best Open Source Project award.

So it was a great awards ceremony for the project.

Video of Open Source People’s Choice Award (Presented by ZaReason)

Video of finalists for Open Source Software Project (SOFA one of 3 finalists)

• Added Mode as an option to Row Stats report tables. Reports mode(s) with N of the mode value(s) e.g. mode weight 72.0, 76.0 (N=23)

  

• Line and area charts can show major labels only as an option.
  

  

• Pie charts now have option of displaying count and percentage (not just in the tooltips as at present).
  

• Histograms use consistent bins when charted by a second variable.
• Better placement of y-axis title when wide labels.
• Pie charts keep consistent colours even if sorted by count rather than value or label.

  

• Better message when adding new reports if required subfolder with javascript and background images is missing. Only show message now if a problem.
• When trying to export report, SOFA checks for expected subfolder as well (otherwise dojo fails for any charts and export fails).
• SOFA prevents attempt to export report if no report file (yet).
• No longer displays View or Export Report buttons on Projects dialog.

And there have also been some important bug fixes making it worth upgrading:

• Fixed bug in row stats where data should have explicitly filtered out None values.
• Fixed bug in setting of min and max values for y-axis for boxplots when min is below 0.
• Refactored code for running report in output module. Easier to understand and also made it easy to save copy of internal html output with absolute paths to images – very helpful when exporting images.
• Built more robust value quoting e.g. for sql statements.

I hope you like it.