i believe they're referring to the observable desktop[0] macos app, a gui client for notebook kit[1]. the cli works great, fwiw!

[0]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/kit) [1]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/desktop

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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thomastjeffery 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The CLI works great for... what?

Isn't the idea to write notes? I think constantly running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane. Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI?

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dwmbt 2 days ago | parent [-]

have you taken a look at what the CLI is for? like you mentioned, it's pretty much just a build step! but there are some runtime things basked that are interesting [0]. i just have a watcher listening to file changes to trigger a rebuild. i have no need for real-time queries so just having the current state at build works for my purposes.

if you must know, the product i work on is primarily a data lake. we have our own query language -> i have a fork of the CLI w added support for parsing custom cells. i don't know of any alternatives that give me a notebook so easily!

> running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane

possibly web-brained take but i don't mind it much. builds are instant for me, network latency is the only thing i find myself waiting around on.

> Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI

well yea, pretty sure the entire point of the desktop app is to show what you can build atop the new api! this preview is meant to expand the capability of observable within your own custom web app. the original framework was too close to some of the frustrations you mentioned, so they're trying to make it more amorphous :)

[0] https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-kit/tree/main/src/r...

	▲	thomastjeffery 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess my point was that I don't really want my first interaction with a thing I'm casually curious about to be me building a custom web app on top of it. By making their GUI app Apple-only, they have lost my casual interest. I'm not sure what they gained by making that compromise.