Observable Plot • Hacker News Board

Re: Observable Plot

#31

Post by eigenvalue » Tue, May 04, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

skadamat wrote: post #16

oandrew wrote: post #15

How does this compare to Apache Echarts ( https://echarts.apache.org/en/index.html ) ? p.s. My favorite data exploration toolkit is Clickhouse + Tabix (it uses apache echarts). e.g. https://tabix.io/doc/draw/Draw_Chart/

I'm very excited about ECharts, Superset is moving all of their charts to ECharts (I wrote about this in fact: https://preset.io/blog/2021-4-1-why-echarts/ )

Wow those are some great looking charts! The one showing the animated busses driving around Beijing is very impressive.

Re: Observable Plot

#32

Post by chaps » Tue, May 04, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

This is really neat! 'Been using observable for about a year now, and I really appreciate how easy it is to share notebooks with it. Circular dependencies can be fun, but that's not really unexpected considering the model y'all use.

How well does this framework do with something relatively complex like an animated choropleth? Vega-lite and D3 can do them both, but they can both get complicated pretty quickly.

Re: Observable Plot

#33

Post by cphills » Tue, May 04, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

This looks great! I spent a few months earlier this year learning and implementing D3 and while a little bit of a learning curve to pick up, it made sense once you got into the flow of things. Looking at this and amazed with how simple it could have been to use as a starting point if there was no need for customization. Great addition to the growing JS solutions for data needs. Another step and tool towards a JS suite of tools for data analysis!

Re: Observable Plot

#34

Post by mbostock » Tue, May 04, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

laGrenouille wrote: post #24

Exciting work; great to see the new wave of data science oriented JavaScript modules like this and Arquero focused on general principles such as the grammar of graphics and relational algebra. If I could make a suggestion to the author: it would be a great selling point to include some interactivity in the example demo. This is really hard in R and Python, but easy in JavaScript, and would be a good/easy selling poin…

Thanks for the suggestion. We will be adding more examples soon (both interactive inputs driving plots, and interactive plots driving outputs). Here’s one with a search box:

https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/us-covid-vaccinations

Re: Observable Plot

#35

Post by mbostock » Tue, May 04, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

chaps wrote: post #32

This is really neat! 'Been using observable for about a year now, and I really appreciate how easy it is to share notebooks with it. Circular dependencies can be fun, but that's not really unexpected considering the model y'all use. How well does this framework do with something relatively complex like an animated choropleth? Vega-lite and D3 can do them both, but they can both get complicated pretty quickly.

We (and by we I really mean my inimitable collaborator Philippe Rivière) have started prototyping plugins for rendering geographic shapes using D3 projections, so I expect Plot would be able to support this fairly soon. Then you can use something like this Scrubber component to drive the animation:

https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/scrubber

Re: Observable Plot

#36

Post by parksy » Tue, May 04, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

mbostock wrote: post #30

parksy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through the tutorials/demos and this seems very intuitive. I don't do a lot of visualisation, but when I do, I've found manually coaxing data and configuring visual parameters to please a library to be tedious as it's time spent doing busy work I'd rather spend analysing the results. So for me the major drawcard is being able to drop a simple table of results in and let the library handle the necessary inferen…

Thanks for the feedback. There’s a test in the repo that does parallel coordinates: https://github.com/observablehq/plot/blob/main/test/plots/ca... It’s not a perfect fit for Plot because Plot wants at most one instance of each scale in a plot. (I.e., Plot isn’t designed to support dual-axis charts where you have two y scales. Dual-axis charts tend not to be a good idea anyway.) So to implement parcoords we use a nor…

Thanks for the reply - even if it's not within the design scope your test code reads much cleaner than the code I've used in the past (where perhaps naively I've manually transformed and presented each dimension individually where you've done a single normalise operation). For sure every tool fits a particular paradigm and parcoords are incredibly niche, but plotting aside from the demo code you provided I can see some general purpose uses for the transformations as well and definitely a good addition to the tool-belt. Good stuff!

Re: Observable Plot

#37

Post by marze » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:01 AM UTC

mbostock wrote: post #2

We’ve been developing Observable Plot for a while now, and I’m thrilled to finally have it out in the public. Feel free to ask me any questions! Or share your plots on Observable and I can make suggestions. ;)

It looks awesome, but from the forums it doesn't appear that there is a built-in way to output direct to a pdf. I would value that feature, as options to convert html to pdf often have page boundary and formatting difficulties.

Am I missing anything, and is there a chance this feature might be added in the near term?

Re: Observable Plot

#38

Post by vermarish » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #18

mbostock wrote: post #2

We’ve been developing Observable Plot for a while now, and I’m thrilled to finally have it out in the public. Feel free to ask me any questions! Or share your plots on Observable and I can make suggestions. ;)

I've been using D3 for charts for a while. I'm not a power-user by any means, but I understand it enough to make basic plots. When would I use this instead of straight D3?

When you only care about which visual encodings best represent your data, and not how those encodings are implemented in SVG/CSS.

Re: Observable Plot

#39

Post by chaps » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

mbostock wrote: post #35

chaps wrote: post #32

This is really neat! 'Been using observable for about a year now, and I really appreciate how easy it is to share notebooks with it. Circular dependencies can be fun, but that's not really unexpected considering the model y'all use. How well does this framework do with something relatively complex like an animated choropleth? Vega-lite and D3 can do them both, but they can both get complicated pretty quickly.

We (and by we I really mean my inimitable collaborator Philippe Rivière) have started prototyping plugins for rendering geographic shapes using D3 projections, so I expect Plot would be able to support this fairly soon. Then you can use something like this Scrubber component to drive the animation: https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/scrubber

Nice, thanks! Scrubber is what I use now, and it's great. Can't wait to see the geometric plugins.

Re: Observable Plot

#40

Post by mbostock » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

marze wrote: post #37

mbostock wrote: post #2

We’ve been developing Observable Plot for a while now, and I’m thrilled to finally have it out in the public. Feel free to ask me any questions! Or share your plots on Observable and I can make suggestions. ;)

It looks awesome, but from the forums it doesn't appear that there is a built-in way to output direct to a pdf. I would value that feature, as options to convert html to pdf often have page boundary and formatting difficulties. Am I missing anything, and is there a chance this feature might be added in the near term?

Plot generates SVG. There’s a variety of tools you can use to convert SVG to PDF. Plot is intended to be used on the web so I don’t think we’ll add direct to PDF rendering. (Though it’s possible that Observable might support it — Observable already supports download options that render SVG to PNG for example.)