Summary

In this chapter, we explored many different ways of laying out the same applications. Starting with the standard sidebar layout, we looked at adding icons, pop-ups, tooltips, and also using the shinythemes package to quickly style a vanilla application. We covered adding a navigation bar to your application as well as using the grid layout from bootstrap CSS to customize your own layouts. Finally, we explored the functionality of the Shiny dashboard package, which allows you to produce tabbed output sections, add in tasks, notifications, and messages for your users, show large friendly icons with key information on, as well as providing an attractive and professional-looking default appearance.

The key to make the most of the material in this chapter, as well as of Shiny generally, is to remember that you can combine the tools that Shiny gives you in a lot of different ways, depending on your needs and your skill set. There's nothing to stop you from using the shiny dashboard package...