Episode 22: A fresh coat of Shiny theming with Carson Sievert

By The Shiny Dev Series Team

July 16, 2021

Earlier this year at RStudio Global, a lot of excitement among the Shiny enthusiasts centered on the brand new bslib and thematic packages for radically changing the style of typical Shiny app user interfaces. I am thrilled to get the inside story on this amazing development with the brilliant author, RStudio software engineer Carson Sievert! In this episode you will hear Carson’s recommendations on getting started with bslib for both Shiny applications and even R-Markdown documents, why SASS (no, not that one) rules empower a Shiny developer to make sweeping changes in CSS, as well as the major milestone release of shinymeta, a package that directly addresses a huge need for traceable and reproducible analyses from Shiny apps in many industries such as life sciences. I hope you enjoy this episode and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel so you can be first to know when future episodes are available!

Resources mentioned in the episode

Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny
bslib: Tools for theming shiny and rmarkdown from R via Bootstrap (3 or 4) Sass rstudio.github.io/bslib
thematic: Simplified theming of ggplot2, lattice, and base R graphics rstudio.github.io/thematic
shinymeta: Record and expose Shiny app logic using metaprogramming rstudio.github.io/shinymeta
flexdashboard: Easy interactive dashboards for R pkgs.rstudio.com/flexdashboard

Episode Timestamps

00:00:00 Episode Introduction
00:02:00 Joining the Shiny team at RStudio and Carson’s book on plotly
00:06:39 Introducing bslib and how it makes custom theming of your Shiny app as easy as possible
00:08:47 Introducing thematic for simplified theming of ggplot2, lattice, and base R graphics
00:14:28 Getting started with bslib
00:23:45 Real-time theming wizard, a tool to play interactively with the theming customization of your shiny app or R Markdown document
00:29:25 Development version of flexdashboard supports bslib now
00:36:38 On the advantages of working with sass over css. bslib helps you work with a front end web developer, writing sass rules and css styles while not having to dive into your Shiny app or R Markdown document
00:46:30 The origins of shinymeta and the ability to fully extract an app’s reactive processing to produce a fully self-contained analysis script or report
00:57:40 Getting started with shinymeta
01:01:20 Shinymeta example of producing reproducible Shiny code
01:05:36 How does Carson recommend to Shiny developers who want to get better at cusotmizing the look and feel of their Shiny app? See Shiny’s Build articles
01:15:35 Attaching metadata to graphical markers in plotly
01:19:47 Episode wrapup