As a new year dawns, so does my obligatory blog explaining what we have planned for it. I'll start by saying that 2024 was, again, another cracking year for us. Not only did it include the rollout of some powerful new features (including the ability to embed statscloud as a widget, and to share projects between PRO users), it was a year that saw our user base roughly double. Again!

As always, statscloud's popularity is growing substantially. It's worth mentioning too that, to date, this growth has simply been down to 'word of mouth'. We haven't had to rely on marketing or merchandise; this growth has been purely organic, and it's a great testimony to the popularity of the app. Because of this, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody for being part of this journey with us and helping us make the app as successful as it is today. We're here because of you!

With our increased momentum, there really is no stopping us now and, once again, we have some great things lined up for you this year. As with last year, we're keeping our goals for 2025 as simple as possible. So, here's what you can expect from us:

New features

R modules

It's true that we had originally planned to roll this out by the end of 2024. We're still very close to doing so (we're eying up the end of Q1 2025) but want to allow a little longer to ensure this update is as comprehensive and stable as possible.

Actually, it's hard to overstate how much of a big deal this update is. From the start, the biggest limitation of statscloud has been that we were not able to offer a comprehensive suite of analysis. However, by allowing you to use R code inside a custom analysis, we'll soon be able to offer far more analyses that will bring us in line with more established stats software offerings. We're talking more complex ANOVA designs, ANCOVA's, MANCOVA's, more post-hoc tests for each of these, Loglinear analysis... I could go on.

So I will: Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, more factor analysis rotation methods, and more reliability analysis methods. For the most part, if it's possible to run it in R, it will be possible to run it in statscloud. As an added bonus, everything you run in R will be wrapped up in our lovely user-interface with the option to copy text, tables, and graphs wherever you want. Essentially, we want to make sure statscloud provides you with the easiest way of running an analysis in R from a point-and-click user interface.

Now I've got you excited for R modules, you can take a sneak peak of them in action via our '2024 update' video which includes a demonstration of how they will work. I think you'll find it'll be well worth the wait!

Reports (Quarto)

One feature that has been on my radar for some time now is the ability to write your own reports inside statscloud using a built-in rich-text editor. The idea of this is that you can select various components in your project (e.g., charts, tables, blocks of text) and include them in a dynamic report surrounded by your own text. You'll then be able to export them to a variety of formats (e.g., .pdf, .html files. etc)

This is particularly topical now as we're witnessing the emergence of Quarto; a new (R markdown-esque) tool that allows you to create dynamic rich-text documents with interactive components. It's clear that this is the future of authoring scientific reports, and we want statscloud to be part of the action. Again, our goal is to ensure statscloud is the easiest way to author Quarto files from a statistics package. Do look out for updates on this later on in the year.

New products

As well as offering the basic version of statscloud at statscloud.app, we've also begun to roll out our new subscription services, including statscloud PRO for individual users, and the ability to host statscloud yourself for organisations (schools, colleges, universities, and businesses). These products allow you and your users to cloud-save your projects, share them with others, and keep your preferences, variables libraries synced across devices.

The response to this has been quite remarkable. So, this year, we'll be focusing more on making these available. We've already prepared some documentation showing you how to get started with your own instance of statscloud, and we're taking steps to make this as simple as possible. We're busy rolling out a licence server, and an accounts page to allow anyone to sign up to statscloud PRO at their leisure.

With all this talk of paid-for services, I want to reassure you again that statscloud.app will always be free and available to everyone at any time on any device. We will never charge you for basic access to the app, and would never impose any time limits for your statscloud sessions. One of our strongest features is that there are no barriers to getting started with statscloud (e.g., no logins or paywalls) and we intend to keep it that way.

New communications

Finally, this year we'll be making a few changes to the way we communicate with you. As social media has seen a shift over the past year, we've decided to adapt. From now on, we'll be reducing our use of Twitter (or "X"), instead focusing on newer, more open social media platforms, including BlueSky and Mastodon. Feel free to give us a follow there!

I hope that gives you a good idea of where things are heading with statscloud. It's clear that statscloud is becoming a major player in the field of stats software today, and these updates will help the app become even more popular.