“SECRET” PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT for our friends in the forum: Observable has been working on revamping notebooks on the web. It works with (almost?) all your existing notebooks, but it is also built (like Desktop) on the new open-source foundation of Notebook Kit. It has better AI, both in the notebook sidebar and as a standalone “Chat” interface where every message is a cell. And it has better community listings. It’s still missing a ton of features (private imports, database clients, minimap), but that and more is coming close behind. You can try it now by logging in with your existing account at https://new.observablehq.com/. There’s some documentation there. You can go back and forth between editors, but the new features won’t work on the old site. There will be a more official announcement next week. We’re eager for early feedback from you, and I’m happy to answer any questions. 6 posts - 4 participants Read full topic

Just watched this interesting interview with Mike on Posit. At one point, Mike mentions that new AI features have been soft launched into Observable Desktop. As far as I can tell, though, the latest version of Desktop is V1.6.0 from March. When can we expect to see and play with it? 5 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

Hi, I’m fairly new to Observable and I’d like to share some of my visualizations. My areas of expertise include social network analysis (SNA), knowledge networks, bibliometrics, and information science. I hope to inspire some of your projects, and I’m including my email address below for collaborations, consulting, or any other assistance you might need. Observable Recent notebooks by Kevin Amilcar Hernández Gutierrez Analista documental |Dspace CRIS | Open Journal System | Front-end Developer | Bibliotecología y gestión de la información 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

This forum launched alongside the Observable beta in January 2018. Over the years we’ve directed people to some different places — the feedback repo on GitHub, the community Slack — and it’s gotten more confusing where to talk, and the community has gotten more diffuse. So we’ve deprecated the community Slack and archived the feedback repo in order to refocus here. I’m sorry for any whiplash. But if you’re here, you’re in the right place! It’s the right place to show off your work, to complain, to request features, to report bugs, to discuss the visualization research that excites you, and whatever else. And we’re getting back to posting more community notebooks on X and Bluesky, so the forum provides great fodder, and we’re grateful for everything you share here. We’re tidying up ahead of launching some new stuff, and are excited to talk about that soon (so I can reply more fully to @neocarto here and @Lao here, lol). Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback. 4 posts - 4 participants Read full topic

Visnu and Toph reflect on three eras of building Observable features atop LLMs, from a notebook sidebar (2023) to Canvases (2025) to a new experimental prototype, Observable Chat.

Julio joins Mike to explain Observable’s mission to make computation universally accessible and understandable. They talk about the value of open source and community, the challenge of designing social collaboration platforms, and the promise and risks of AI.

Mike and Toph return for the second episode to talk reactivity and making code easier for humans to understand. They show the quirky syntax of Notebooks 1.0, and how Notebooks 2.0 brings reactivity to standard (vanilla) syntax.

In this inaugural (practice?) episode of the Observable Podcast, Mike and Toph share reflections on building with Next.js and how React has evolved over the years. They are excited by, and a little scared of, the magic of React Server Functions.