I made an interactive implementation here: https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/smith-chart
Readit Newsmbostock commented on How to make a Smith chart johndcook.com/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/tzury
mbostock commented on Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview observablehq.com/notebook... · Posted by u/mbostock
The updated syntax looks brilliant — can't wait to try it out by upgrading some of my older notebooks! I was worried about the future of Observable since the Canvas announcement — it felt like notebooks were being slowly phased out, but I'm glad to be proven wrong.
Any timeline on bringing the new format to the Web editor? For me, the biggest draw of Observable is being able to instantly start exploring and visualizing some data without ANY setup (creating some local files, installing dependencies, launching a dev server etc.) — just click "New notebook" and off you go, frictionless. I hope this remains a priority.
Also worth mentioning the data viz community aspect, which I used to enjoy a ton — it's a bummer that things like being able to follow certain users and see their new notebooks in a feed were phased out, and that trending notebooks are now hidden under the Help menu instead of being featured on the user's homepage. This might be one of the reasons I stopped coming back to the platform as often, although I realize building a community is very difficult and hard to monetize — just thought I'd share.
Thank you. I don’t want to commit to a public timeline on the web editor yet, but rest assured it is a top priority, and we also value the convenience of a web editor, instant collaboration, and community!
mbostock commented on Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview observablehq.com/notebook... · Posted by u/mbostock
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
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.
Im still hoping that Typescript support comes soon!
Thanks for the feedback. We implemented the transform to strip TypeScript annotations (using esbuild)…
https://github.com/observablehq/framework/pull/129
but this approach stalled because it doesn’t implement validation of TypeScript: the TypeScript annotations are simply ignored. I felt this defeats the point of using TypeScript. We probably need to use tsc instead of esbuild to get type checking. Hints welcome!
The React support looks interesting, are there any examples available? I couldn't spot any in https://github.com/observablehq/framework/tree/main/examples
Currently the only examples are here: https://observablehq.com/framework/jsx
Plot and Framework are locked into the Observable ecosystem, which has its own learning curve. Learning D3 offers the best flexibility and control.
In what way are these free open-source tools “locked-in” to Observable? Observable Plot is a vanilla JavaScript library that is released under the ISC license and can be used with any style of web development (e.g., React, Svelte, whatever). And likewise Observable Framework is released under the ISC license and you’re able to self-host projects anywhere and develop locally?
Here’s the D3 implementation (which is just an interrupted azimuthal equidistant projection):
https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispher...