Wednesday, 31st January 2018
Observable Beta (via) Observable just released their beta, and it’s quite something. It’s by Mike Bostock (d3), Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, CoffeeScript) and Tom MacWright (Mapbox Studio). The easiest way to describe it is Jupyter notebooks for JavaScript supporting reactive programming—so code is evaluated as you type and you can add interactive widgets (like sliders and canvas views) to construct explorable visualizations on the fly.
Observable: An Earthquake Globe in Ten Minutes. Well worth your time. Jeremy Ashkenas uses Observable to live-code an interactive visualization of recent earthquakes around the world, using USGS data (fetched as JSON), d3, topoJSON and an Observable notebook. I’m sold—this is truly ground-breaking new technology.
USGS World Earthquake Map (observable notebook). Here’s an extended version of the notebook constructed by Jeremy Ashkenas in that Observable YouTube demo. You really need to check this thing out—the notebook itself has sliders in that you can manipulate (even on a mobile browser) or you can click to edit the code and see your changes reflected in real-time. If you sign in with GitHub you can fork the project to your own account and save your changes.