Wishlist for Pro plan

Apart from the ability to keep private notebooks, I would also love to see some goodies that make me feel privileged (rather than forced) being a Pro user.

I’ll start gathering my ideas below one-per-comment, so you can add reactions. And invite you to share your ideas too.

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×2 File Attachment limits.

Sometimes I have 51 Mb file to upload and I have to workaround the limit by:

  • converting json to csv
  • removing not important fields
  • shortening long column names
  • splitting file in chunks or file-per-column

Anyway I will use 51Mb of space, but with much more friction.
100Mb limit will reduce such cases a lot.

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Personal Observable hosted cors-anywhere proxy

Most of my notebooks fetch something from 3rd party servers. Some of them do not allow cross origin requests, so I need a proxy.
I have one on heroku, but they will shut down free dynos in November, so I’ll need another solution.
Would be nice to have built-in Observable proxy that allows requests from my notebooks
Origin: https://<user>.static.observableusercontent.com

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Early access to upcoming features

So we can give feedback that will shape the future product.

Just as an aside, https://corsproxy.io/ has become quite popular, and the company has pledged to maintain it indefinitely (since they’re using it themselves).

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Thank you! I was not aware of corsproxy.io. It covers some of my use cases, but for private APIs with sensitive data I still want to use my own or hosted by Observable proxy.

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I would love to see better intellisense features on this site. I’ve since quite the platform because after years they still haven’t reached par for basically every other code editor on the internet. Now that stackblitz is getting VSCode running in browser, why use this platform that can’t even show the signature of the method I’m calling.

Other thing is like to see is support when pinning cells open is to let the pinner pick whether cell content is pinned above or below the code. Right now it always pins above which optimizes (according to them) for reading, but not for developing. I’m tired of entire web page shifting around and scrolling my code out of view every time I edit cell that modified the cell content because the content is above the code in the dom.

Basically, this platform needs massive improvements to DX before I’d consider paying for it. I have been tolerating lack of features because it was free.

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Thanks for kicking off this topic.

It would be great to use the feedback repo though, since that is where we gather feature requests. I would recommend logging it in the feedback repo and then adding a link in this thread for others to see and perhaps add their thoughts and +1’s to the issue in GitHub. It works much better for notifying when there is progress on an item and also for us to know who to reach out to when we have questions about the ideas/suggestions.

Thanks!

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Thank you Cobus! Some of us love lazy forum feedback, and I am such a one. So here goes: I would love to ‘pause public’. I know I will break a notebook and will re-share, but if someone clicks in when I am working, I don’t want them to see the damage. How about a ‘notebook lock’ feature for concentrated, forced single-party editing?

I second just about everything @keystroke said.

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We recently added Editor hints.

You will now see contextual help in the editor. This includes better autocompletions as well as a “Signature help” pane that displays any documentation as well as the types of the arguments for a function or method. This is powered by the TypeScript language service, and we currently support within-cell type inference as well as all modern ECMAScript browser libraries.

See our Release notes.

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Seems commenting on the notebook is broken I keep getting pop-up to sign-in. Additionally the gif do not play on iOS safari so they just static images, they working on desktop browser though.

Commenting is locked on that notebook. But it shouldn’t prompt you to sign in! That is a bug that I will file internally (thanks for catching that!).

IMHO, the comment buttons shouldn’t appear if commenting is locked (for UX). Or they should be disabled, with a corresponding tooltip (or other similar message) to communicate that.

Edit: FWIW, I just noticed the “Comments locked” note at the top. I still would say that it’s a problem that the comment button appears to function.