Big fan of the Notebooks. Hope the offline verison is hardened and available on windows soon enough.
These data viz are great dashboard builders but need a local/offline solution for my needs.
Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#12I'm curious to understand why did you decided to develop a local app?
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#13It's pretty clear the future is not really here yet when the LLM can't even debug a simple table join issue on its own. The code to produce the table and chart should reasonably be like 2 lines of code with proper tool design. It looks like the LLM accomplishes it in 100 LOC and still can't manage to do it without significant human intervention.
And this is the take they published to sell the thing!
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#14I'd love to love them but I don't: I can't seem to justify moving away from Python to use this. What advantages does JS offer for this use case? I' ve never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python (but I don't do nice newspaper figures).
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#15I'm not sure I understand what the offering is here. I read the website, and watched the video, but it doesn't really make sense. Is Notebook 2.0 just a HTML subset that starts with e.g. instead of ? Then what's the notebook kit npm package? Then there's an editor? I've come away from the page a little irritated, because starts with hyperbole like "the future of notebooks is here", and then the "hello world" in the n…
They probably could have explained better what hasn’t changed. Observable Notebooks work like a spreadsheet or makefile. The cells aren’t executed top to bottom (like a Jupyter Notebook). Instead they’re executed in dependency order.
Looks like this is still true with the new system:
> The Build API analyzes cell source code to find unbound references, such that the appropriate variable graph can be initialized using the Observable Runtime. For non-JavaScript cells (such as Markdown, HTML, and SQL), the Build API also transpiles the source into a tagged template literal expression.
This is unlike other document formats. They made the cells look like standard JavaScript now (versus the JavaScript variant they had before) but the file format is necessarily different, because the execution model is different. There is a build step to ensure that the cells will be executed in the right order on page load.
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#16I'd love to love them but I don't: I can't seem to justify moving away from Python to use this. What advantages does JS offer for this use case? I' ve never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python (but I don't do nice newspaper figures).
Maybe I just don't know enough python libraries but I can get to a good-looking interactive visual in Observable in almost no time at all.
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#17I'm curious to understand why did you decided to develop a local app?
I don't know but it's nice if the local app doesn't have the 50MB file size limit that the hosted notebooks have.
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#18I used the older online notebooks for a bit and really loved the immediacy but I’m always hurting for TypeScript syntax support. The is this a thing w 2.0? Something I’ll need to add later with Vite and only available locally? It was a bunmer to not be able to copy paste code from my projects into observable. With local notebooks I see more potential for homegrown workflow but for me the benefit was always the platfo…
We’re interested in adding a TypeScript cell mode, probably first with type stripping rather than validating types. I was hoping for a pure JavaScript implementation; maybe we’ll try https://github.com/bloomberg/ts-blank-space? I’ve also been looking at https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-ts for the editor, but it’s a lot of machinery.
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#19They have or at least used to make their notebook format public, and I always thought if I ever see someone else adopt it then maybe the project will be worth looking at again. I think there could be better ways to capitalize on d3 but this one seems self limiting.
Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview
#20Out of curiosity, why ` ` as an element and not a standard web-component ` ` or something like that if the goal is to go all-in on "normal" web development?
They made the syntax look familiar so that standard editors (and LLM’s) will work, but this is still a custom file format that requires a build step to convert into an HTML page. See my other comment.
The build tool is open source and unlike a Jupyter notebook, it’s easy to edit without a custom editor. So you don’t need their editor, but it will still be nicer to edit with their editor.