Observable Plot 0.6.7 released: pointer interaction, tip mark | Hacker News Reader

Observable Plot 0.6.7 released: pointer interaction, tip mark

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65 pointsmbostock8 comments

This is so much better than trying to format the string you want into the `title` channel of some other mark.

Yes! We’re trying to make it easy (convenient/fast) to make readable visualizations. If it’s tedious to add a tip, then you won’t do it as often, and you might miss an interesting observation.

This is so exciting! Tooltips were the single most important missing feature for me.

Thanks, Simon! We’ve been working our way through the most asked-for features. This was #2 after TypeScript declarations which we shipped in 0.6.5.

Support for interaction was the biggest conceptual piece left to declare “1.0”, so I’m thrilled by the progress we’ve made. This is the culmination of a couple years of thinking and experimentation! Fil got brushing working a few minutes after the release, so I suspect we’ll see brushing and other selection modes in the near future. (Sneak peek: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-brush-interactio...) We also want to allow panning & zooming and declarative animation, but I expect those to take longer.

That demo is really cool - I added "Inputs.table(selection)" to it and being able to drag selections on the chart and see the results instantly in a table is very neat.

At a quick glance I feel Bokeh does a lot of this perfectly (especially tooltips, interactive exploration and selection), where does this shine best in comparison?

So why would someone choose observable plot over other libraries, for example chartjs? I don't see any comparisons or arguments in the docs [0] that acknowledge the other big js charting libraries.

If you want specifics, I tend to use chartjs for real time data visualization. I often find it tedious to add markup graphics in real time (for example, to draw attention to or highlight anomalies).

[0] https://observablehq.com/plot/why-plot

I’ve built lousy versions of these features multiple times, and I’m glad I won’t ever have to do it again.

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