Wanted to give a heads-up that, if we can get a few things done, we are planning to make the new Observable (“notebooks 2.0”) the default early next week. You’ll still be able to use the complete self-contained old experience at a modified URL.
Imports will be fixed by then. Database connectors are almost ready. Version history and inspector improvements (reducing the need to explicitly call display all the time) will follow close behind.
I’ve been talking to some educators and realize this is tough timing with the start of the semester. It should be easy to point your students to the old experience if that’s what they need.
We are trying to move people over more aggressively because we need the rich feedback loop of diverse usage to prioritize and help us move fast and smart. And because people keep finding bugs in the old site we can’t invest in fixing right now!
Glad to see you moving wholesale over to 2.0 soon (from a UK educator’s point of view, the timing is fine if it is next week).
Am intrigued to know how you plan to reduce need for display. This is one of the minor bits of friction for teaching beginners as there is just that little extra bit of code and nested parentheses that add to cognitive load. (On the positive side, I do like the ability to have multiple display() calls in a cell to generate sequential output).
Some implicit inspection of top-level variables, more like 1.0. As we were rewriting our marketing page we kept coming back to what a key tenet “inspect things next to their definition” is — how central it is to our pitch for interpretability, bridging the gulfs of evaluation and execution. But we still gotta think and play more with how to balance that against clutter.
At the time of cutover, we’ll definitely keep existing embed links working; e.g., https://new.observablehq.com/embed/@d3/bar-chart?cells=chart works today, by proxying to the 1.0 embed renderer. But you can’t (reliably) embed a 2.0 notebook yet, similar to the situation with imports today. Shouldn’t be too hard; About | Observable already embeds notebooks and chats, so we’re partway there…
So, if I understand correctly, it’s not currently possible to embed, for example, the maps produced in this notebook. Do you know when this will be possible?
Yup that’s correct. I’d guess it’d take a month or two. (But all these things depend on the priorities we hear from people! So it helps us a lot to hear what’s most painful for you.)
Oh actually — I should distinguish between iframe embed and JavaScript runtime embed. The latter we should get almost “for free” with the imports work. Which matters more to you?
On new notebooks, in mobile, if I fork I cannot choose the team into which I want that fork to go. It chooses one, and that is it… till I get to desktop. Oh, and once I fork, I am not seeing a mobile UI path to transfer to another team/account
Yes, we haven’t implemented transferring notebooks between workspaces yet. (Relatively few people are in multiple teams, so this hasn’t been as urgent as other features.) It’s likely that the fork button will continue to use your default workspace (which will also be configurable in the future, but the current heuristic should work for most people), but you’ll then be able to transfer the fork into another workspace after if you want it somewhere else.
The team are probably aware of this already, but it took me a while to work out where the problem was so will report it here too for others’ benefit:
A private 2.0 notebook importing from an unlisted 2.0 notebook takes approximately 20 seconds on its initial load (some kind of timeout?) before the page is rendered. Subsequent loads are fast, perhaps suggesting private-build or server-side caching (and this was why it took me time to isolate the problem). The page will sometimes report “Cross-origin script load denied by Cross-Origin Resource Sharing policy” on initial load.
An otherwise identical public unlisted importing notebook loads immediately without this problem. So making (non-custom name) pages unlisted public has been the workaround for me while the 2.0 imports are worked through.