Make it make sense

San Francisco, CA
You can now create and manage teams in the new Observable, use Opus 5.5, connect to MySQL… but, most exciting, and by far the most overdue: you can now access SQL cells’ metadata fields by opening the cell menu with ⌃M. Keep those hands on that keyboard! observablehq.com/@observable…
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This has been an issue since we introduced SQL cells in 2021 & was exacerbated by later “UI cells”. Pressing tab inside the cell editor inserts spaces; pressing ⌥tab focuses the next cell. But we never adding keybindings for focusing controls outside / “in-between” cell editors.
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Observable retweeted
Replying to @shuvam360 @SignozHQ
One more UI pattern you can try out to enable your users to test their hypothesis by querying sections of your code, brushing with coordinated views old.observablehq.com/blog/li… Continuously modify a query and immediately change the visualization with coordinated views. Solves the problem of “I have a large or continuous information space. Let me manipulate the question directly and immediately see what changes.”
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We hope this tweet finds you… like, at all. “Submarine cables laid in the bottom of the Earth’s oceans”, visualized by @vastur observablehq.com/@vasturiano…
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Pack four mirrored spheres inside the four walls of a tetrahedron (a pyramid). Paint the walls red, green, blue, and white. Then shoot rays out of your eyes. As they bounce, you find that the regions colored each color all somehow share a coastline. observablehq.com/@nxrix/wada…
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The concept of three lakes somehow all sharing a coastline was introduced by Kunizō Yoneyama in his 1917 “Theory of Continuous Set of Points”; he said the idea was suggested by Takeo Wada. Hence, “Wada basins”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_…
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When you make a notebook on your own, does it belong to YOU, or to a kind of “shell company” set up in your name? It was once the former. Then, like many SaaS platforms, we moved to treat every individual as an on-ramp to a team account. We’re going back. observablehq.com/@observable…
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Stephan Schiffels, @stschiff, a researcher who sometimes uses principal component analysis for genetics, here illustrates the concept using EU flags. observablehq.com/@stschiff/p…
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New podcast: Last week, we launched a total rewrite of notebooks. Contra @spolsky’s advice, @mbostock has done many rewrites, from TiVo to Protovis to D3, and itches to do many more. Why? piped.video/watch?v=oP1RxdJo…
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(Notice that the Observable Podcast is not afraid of dead air! Take a few seconds, breathe, relax!)
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What was Mike’s first rewrite?
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Fetch and query caching both use our new programmatic file attachments: observablehq.com/@observable… Great to have, but use judiciously; there are tradeoffs. Caching is ~hidden state that can make notebook behavior harder to reason about. Hence one of the two hard problems in CS…
Great to see that fetches can be cached to a file attachment in @observablehq now, so anyone can view the notebook with saved data. observablehq.com/@observable…
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Simulation of binary black holes. Original concept by Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13831 Relativistic GLSL ray-tracing notebook by @NxrixWasTaken observablehq.com/@nxrix/bina… Added starfield and orbit controls by @LaoTzunami observablehq.com/d/cca8d2013…
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Lots of fixes/improvements since Tuesday’s relaunch: DatabaseClient backwards compatibility, BigQuery, more granular permissions, more prominent query cache ages, paste/drop files into editor. We’re sorry for the disruption and grateful for your feedback! observablehq.com/@observable…
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Since Friday: show spinner for loading cell; export cells to CSV, JSON, HTML, CSS, text, Arrow; drag and drop onto files panel; notify when mentioned in a comment; reload clients older than skew protection; fix logging into old site with certain accounts.
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Short compelling notebook by @paulchaikin: when @CP3 joined a team, their win percentage went up. observablehq.com/@pamacha/wh…
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For more than a year, we’ve been quietly building an all-new Observable. Today, that new Observable is live on observablehq.com. Read @mbostock’s announcement: observablehq.com/@observable…
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Finally, read Mike verbatim on “why we continue to pour our heart and soul into this”:
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The new site is live at observablehq.com/. The old site lives on at old.observablehq.com/. Discuss in the forum talk.observablehq.com/ or email support@observablehq.com. Thank you!
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