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Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

observablehq.com

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Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#6

Post by 1dom »

I'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 new notebook 2.0 format looks like HTML, and a video of what could have just been a generic AI chat window.

Maybe I'm too hungry/tired to make sense of it right now. Will be interesting to read what others think.

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#7

Post by jitl »

I 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 platform and how starting a new thing was as simple as going to a webpage and clicking plus.

Anyways excited to play with this once it ends up in the online editor

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#8

Post by pphysch »

svieira wrote: post #4

Out 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?

I think the goal is explicitly not to go all-in on normal web development, to maintain some opportunity to monetize.

D3.js started as/still is just a (collection of) JS libraries. Then Observable came along, and while it is a nice tool for tinkering with D3, it was not at all obvious how to then move your finished Observable D3 viz to a fully self-hosted, regular website (without paying a subscription to use their custom runtime or servers or whatever).

Now I guess they realize they strayed way too far from "the web" and are back-tracking.

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#9

Post by RobinL »

This looks great. I love the idea behind notebooks and for a long time it was my favourite environment to program in. But slowly I stopped using them because it never quite felt like the code was entirely mine, and alternatives became easier due to llms. This looks like exactly the remedy I was hoping for. I'm excited to start using them again.

Re: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

#10

Post by chaps »

1dom wrote: post #6

I'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…

Have a look at https://observablehq.com/@observablehq and just poke around.

It's a neat tool that solves a lot of specific sharing/visualization problems (think of newsroom data analysis).

I like observable but I hate how much it feels like the service has been taken over by product managers looking for that next bump.

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