Mike Bostock, creator of D3 and Observable, writes about data visualization, mapping, and JavaScript tooling.
HN commenters praise him as a prolific writer of tutorials and examples, and cite his command-line cartography series, though one got stuck on projections.
The app itself is well done, but the editing experience is quite lacking...It's 2018 and people don't want to write html/css/js as if writing txt files. https://codesandbox.io can be a good inspiration to learn from. I believe its popularity is a result of using Monaco[0] and supporting Language Servers[1].
I would advise looking into editing/language support early. Auto completion (for DOM API, D3 API, etc) and error checking can be very helpful to the user.
Still, congratulations to the launch (the app looks beautiful and UX is pretty solid)! When I was reading @mbostock's medium post[2] a few months ago I knew something like this will popup.
Anyway, back to building my own thing which focuses on the editing side of playgrounds, which I think is what most online ones (Codepen / JSFiddle) lack.
[0]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor
[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol
[2]: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0
This looks so very useful. Also, good timing since we're just about to make a new visualization which could be used for more things in future. I dabbled with Plotly when it was announced, but had trouble with connecting our data sources and ran out of time.
I see the OP is here answering questions. Have you thought about Gapminder like animations?
I'd like to show our statistics with map data from our GIS systems. In the announcement the Walmart demo shows map from Mapbox so there's support for their service. Could you elaborate on what options there is for visualizing geographic information?
There was so much in the announcement from Jupyter to Excel like reactive components. It resembles Mike Bostock's D3.express in this regard [1]. I can't wait to start playing with this!
[1] https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0
I think I'm effectively a flat earther because I wasn't able to generalize Bostock's "Command Line Cartography" [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people?
0. https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8ca2c
1. https://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/nad83-california-albers/
I wrote more about the motivation for Observable (formerly d3.express) last year: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0
It’s easy to use D3 within Observable, but it’s not pre-loaded or specifically built-in. Any browser library published to npm can be loaded via require (for AMD) or dynamic import (for ES modules). I’ve published a bunch of notebooks with D3 but you’ll find other ones with THREE.js, Vega-Lite, Leaflet and other libraries.
The great thing about D3 is that Mike Bostock is a prolific writer of tutorials and examples. For map-making, I taught myself a lot of D3 with his Let's Make a Map article (https://bost.ocks.org/mike/map/), which is now a bit outdated with the update to D3 4.x so there's a new tutorial series here: https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8ca2c.
> 4: Raw SVG >= D3 for simple data visualisations
You can have a bit of both. D3 has a dependency "d3-scale" [0], which is a perfect choice if you'd like D3 to do the math and React to take care of the DOM.
0: https://medium.com/@mbostock/introducing-d3-scale-61980c51545f#.3ohtn0oj9