I like to begin each year by talking about some of the upcoming features we've got planned for statscloud. In previous years, when statscloud was deep in development, new features were coming thick and fast, and it was a bit tricky to keep track of all the new things we had on offer. Now, as we approach our first finalised product, we're focused on delivering three big features that will help us get us to our v1.0 release. So, here they are:

Widgets

This feature was being developed late last year and is actually already available in the app today! As well as being able to embed the whole statscloud app into an HTML page, we wanted to make it possible to embed a more streamlined version of the app: a version of the app that is smaller, more focused, and can slot into any online resource seamlessly.

Let me show you:

You're looking at the new statscloud widget: an interactive version of the app ready to embed right into your online resources (e.g., teaching materials, Virtual Learning Environment posts, blogs. etc). Go ahead, have a play around! You can click/tap through the various tabs, edit the data, look at the chart, and do everything you could usually do in the app without leaving this page.

Generating a statscloud widget is really easy to do and you can make use of this right now. In your project, just click/tap the 'Share' icon in the main sidebar on the left, select the "Widget" tab and take a look at what your widget will look like. There are lots of customisable features too; as well as choosing what you'd like to include in the widget, you can also change the appearance, choose what tabs you'd like to appear, and what tab you'd like to be open by default. The app gives you all the code you need for your widget so you can just paste it into any HTML editor.

An interactive widget for an statistics app is completely unique to statscloud. Owing to the technology powering statscloud (that allows many thousands of users accessing and using the app simultaneously) we can afford to offer a publicly-available widget to everyone without any cost to you or us.

Once again, we're proud to be leading the way on this and look forward to seeing this level of exposure boost the popularity of the statscloud even more!

Sharing (live) projects

As evident from above, it's already possible to share a project publicly through a simple URL, whether it be a link to open the project in the app or an embedded version of the app on a webpage. Currently though, you can only share a snapshot of a project. All of the data you want to share is present in the actual URL as a set of instructions to rebuild your project on another person's device. However, now, we want to go one stage further and let you share live projects with others.

With this new feature, you can share a simple link to a live project you're working on. When you make changes to your project, all those who have the link to your project will see the live changes when they refresh the page, so there's no need to generate a new link to your project every time it changes.

This feature will be available for all those hosting their own instance of statscloud. In case you're not aware, we now allow institutions (schools, colleges, universities, businesses) the option to host their own version of statscloud, so you can customise the app to look what you like, add your own users, and control exactly how the app functions for all of them.

Custom scripts/modules

Of course, I've saved the best for last.

This year, we'll be offering you our biggest feature yet: the opportunity to add your own custom modules for statscloud that you can use on any of your projects.

Why do this? Well, over the years, we've tried to make statscloud as feature-rich as possible, but we understand that there are still some analyses or charts you may need that aren't currently available in the app. While we're working hard to add more of these, the reality is that - like any other statistics app - we'll never be able to provide a full suite of features that cater to everyone's needs.

You may have your own R/Python script that you'd like to apply on the data in your statscloud project. Perhaps you'd like to run a script to clean up the data set, to generate a detailed chart, or run your own bespoke analysis. Whatever you have a script to do, you'll be able to import it, save it to a library, and run it on any of your projects right inside statscloud whenever you want.

We want to make it as easy as possible to add your own custom modules to statscloud too. So, you won't need to go through any complicated developer documentation or have any specialised knowledge to author a module for statscloud; just copy in an existing R/Python script and the app will do the rest!

Similarly, sharing scripts will just be a case of dropping a file into the app and, if you're running your own instance of statscloud, you can add these scripts to a library for your users so they'll be able to access them right from the start.

This addition means that the potential of statscloud will be unlimited. Needless to say, this is something I'm very excited about!

Conclusion

As well as these features, we'll of course be pushing out more small enhancements and bug fixes throughout the year, and keep the app looking slick and performing as smoothly as possible.

All in all, 2024 should be another great year for us, and we're thrilled to have you on board for it!