6 items tagged “mike-bostock”
2024
Observable Framework 1.1 (via) Less than three weeks after 1.0, the 1.1 release adds a whole lot of interesting new stuff. The signature feature is self-hosted npm imports: Framework 1.0 linked out to CDN hosted copies of libraries, but 1.1 fetches copies locally and then bundles that code with the deployed static site.
This works by using the acorn JavaScript parsing library to statically analyze the code and find all of the relevant imports.
Interesting ideas in Observable Framework
Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework:
[... 2,123 words]2021
Observable Plot (via) This is huge: a brand new high-level JavaScript visualization library from Mike Bostock, the author of D3—partially inspired by Vega-Lite which I’ve used enthusiastically in the past. First impressions are that this is a big step forward for quickly building high-quality visualizations. It’s released under the ISC license which is “functionally equivalent to the BSD 2-Clause and MIT licenses”.
When building a tool, it’s easy to forget how much you’ve internalized: how much knowledge and context you’ve assumed. Your tool can feel familiar or even obvious to you while being utterly foreign to everyone else. If your goal is for other people to use the darn thing — meaning you’re not just building for yourself, or tinkering for its own sake (which are totally valid reasons) — you gotta help people use it! It doesn’t matter what’s possible or what you intended; all that matters is whether people actually succeed in practice.
2019
D3 Projection Comparison (via) Fun Observable notebook that lets you compare any two out of D3’s 96 (!) geographical projections of the world.
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.