The Desktop and Observable 2.0

Feedback
1

A little feedback here but also an inquiry about the future of 2.0.

I am a literary, NLP coder and an educator, and one of my interests is in Observable as an introduction to making language and literature interface more intelligently and sensitively with computation. Observable, especially 2.0, has great potential for this.

The Desktop notebook editor was a marvellous introduction to a whole new way of working. It has an open, standards-based format for .html documents that can be rendered in the Desktop’s local live-coding notebook editor. Thus, there is a way of moving from local notebooks, to versioned development repos, to static websites, all with code and data (human) readable and readably structured at every phase of the workflow?! This is exactly what I needed and wanted, not least because it also rendered projects archiveable and preservable (in principle anyway, at least for the life of the webstack).

Now, although I’m pretty sure that the Notebook-kit will continue to be maintained and supported, I am curious to know if a supported Desktop editor will be with us for much longer, and if there is any chance that there will be Desktop editors for other OS? That’s my question and I really just want to know one way or the other, because …

In terms of Feedback, I’d want to point out that an (A) workflow - (1) create notebooks locally, (2) develop, build, test while versioning, (3) deploy as static site - is surprisingly different from a (B) workflow: (1) create notebooks on Observable 2.0, (1a) download notebooks to local project, then proceed to (2) and (3). And the “download notebooks” part must be kept up-to-date with any online platform developments. And if the answer to the question above is that the Desktop’s days are numbered, then teaching students an (A) workflow would not be such a good idea. (I do realize, btw, that for sophisticated users things like VS Code extensions render the Desktop editor all but unnecessary. But I can’t help thinking about the “civilian experience” as it were.)

2

Another great question John.

The Desktop app has fallen a little behind the web right now (especially in how we handle databases and file attachments), but we have generally been keeping it updated throughout development (e.g. to use the same AI agent) and will continue to make a sporadic effort at that. We don’t expect it to be the main way most people use Observable, but we want it to be an option.

We also think desktop and web tend to serve very different personas and use cases, so we don’t want to even try anything like real-time sync. There should be some path back and forth, but we expect it to be rare. We know there are use cases for fast frequent sync, but in general, as you say, the strengths of files and the strengths of the web are so anti-correlated that each should be allowed to shine untethered to the other. So e.g. web gets one-click share, and desktop gets data loaders running on your actual personal machine.

And if the answer to the question above is that the Desktop’s days are numbered…

Part of the point of the Notebook Kit and Desktop app is that, on some level, it should not matter if Desktop’s days are numbered.* You’ve installed it, it runs offline, it uses local files, and it can keep on doing that indefinitely. (It does currently have a one-time need to log in, but that’s it.) Obviously all software rots. But, if you have very particular workflows, or extremely private data, or are attached to some interface, or have other niche needs, we do not want you to be at the mercy of the one all-powerful Observable Inc. to give you the one interface to end all interfaces. All this friction this week, from one point of view, vindicates that the notebook ecosystem has gotten too rich and big for any one interface to be simultaneously (1) clean, elegant, parsimonious, learnable and (2) powerful, integrated, comprehensive, replete with affordances. We think of the web as focused on (1), and hope the Notebook Kit ecosystem can begin to bear more of the weight of (2). But that still entails some work from us!!

* “Of all arithmetical rules this is the hardest—to number our days. Men can number their herds and droves of oxen and of sheep, they can estimate the revenues of their manors and farms, they can with a little pains number and tell their coins, and yet they are persuaded that their days are infinite and innumerable and therefore do never begin to number them. Who saith not upon the view of another, surely yonder man looketh by his countenance as if he would not live long, or yonder woman is old, her days cannot be many: thus we can number other men’s days and years, and utterly forget our own, therefore this is the true wisdom of mortal men, to number their own days.” —Thomas Tymme.

3

Thanks for this helpful reply @tophtucker ! (And nice quote from Rev. Tymme :wink: )

4

Feeding back a little more on this one @tophtucker after having reported what I thought was an issue to the GitHub repo and then learning that Notebook Kit’s download command uses the old Observable API: the .js or .ts cells in a new notebook are all downloaded as .ojs cells.

I wanted to make a plea, here, that the Notebook Kit download command gets updated soon since I am already developing new notebooks and wanting to download them into local Notebook Kit repos for static site generation. At the moment, I workaround by only notebook-coding in .js cells, then use the existing download command, then get a shell script to find and replace application/vnd.observable.javascript with module in the html files. This works, but it’s a hack! (And I would rather not have to teach it to my students :wink: )

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Where can I find the page with projects that I liked? I marked some interesting examples for myself.

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@quillcraft You can filter any workspace to just notebooks you’ve starred:

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Or filter the “public workspace”, the collective pseudo-workspace of everything everyone has published, everyone else’s stuff: https://observablehq.com/public?starred=true

(Let me know if you meant something else!)

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I’m fully on board with a Web-first focus the team is following. Web-Notebooks are awesome, instantly sharable and have zero friction to create and get started. The only reason why I sometimes revert to Observable Desktop is because I sometimes analyse large data sets that are too cumbersome to get onto the web. It’s great that Observable Desktop exists, and I sure hope it will continue to work, even if it’s a bit behind the Web. And I agree that with notebook-kit there is a future for offline-observable even beyond Observable Desktop, say with a clever Editor plugin or a community-build editor.

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O! Thanks )