Release notes

We are beginning to roll out dashboards and controls to Observable Canvas users.

• Use the “Control” button on the bottom toolbar to add an input control to your canvas, such as a slider, date range, or toggle.

  • Controls can be referenced by name in SQL nodes. When you interact with a control, your query (and anything downstream) will update.

  • You can configure the available options for each control.

  • Controls types include date, date range, numeric range, radio group, select, slider, text, and toggle.

• Use the “Dashboard” button on the bottom toolbar to add a dashboard builder to your canvas.

  • You can name your dashboard and add nodes and controls to it.

  • You can view your dashboard at its own dedicated page in a mobile-friendly responsive grid layout.

  • Nodes and controls retain their same dataflow from the canvas, so you can interact with your dashboard through controls and chart brushes.

Tiled dot map, a new chart type in Observable Canvases, allows you to create interactive, zoomable tile maps from a set of latitude and longitude coordinates.

We have added significant new functionality:

• You can now create an iframe that embeds any part of a canvas by right-clicking and selecting “Generate embed code”. If a node’s data is more than 24 hours old, embeds pull fresh data. Since embeds use an API key to access your data source, they should only be embedded for a trusted internal audience.

• Presentation views now support reactive interactive filtering and fresher data. If a node’s data is more than 24 hours old, presentation views will now also pull fresh data. They also now show any edges that exist between displayed nodes.

• There are several new chart types: stacked area, streamgraph, bump chart, circle packing, isotype, and arc map (inspired in part by this recent map in the New York Times).

• You can now see and restore past versions of the canvas from the main menu > “File” > “Show version history”. New versions are automatically saved every minute while you edit, or you can add a manual version with a note.

Some things now work a bit differently:

• Clicking a node once now merely selects it, so you can resize, drag, duplicate, etc. To interact with or edit the contents of a node, you now have to double-click it, which matches the behavior of other editable shapes. With a node selected, you can also press Enter to edit it, and Esc to exit edit mode.

• Nodes are now connected using a new shape called a “connector” (instead of arrows), which connect to ports on either side of the node. Connectors disallow connections that don’t make sense, like duplicate inputs or circular references. Referencing a table in a SQL node produces a read-only connector pointing to that table.

• The menus and panels on the left have been combined into a single full-height sidebar. Collapse it to a small floating panel with a “Toggle sidebar” button.

• You can now add new nodes downstream from a vertical toolbar floating to the right of the node.

• The chart sidebar settings have been redesigned into three tabs: the “Type” tab (browse and select chart types) and “Data” tab (configure encodings), and the pre-existing “Options” tab.

• Stacked bars and columns are now separate chart types from unstacked bars and columns.

We’ve improved the overall robustness and “quality of life”:

• The data panel now supports multiple schemas, and will list all schemas it has access to in the data source.

• When a node is disconnected from its input, it now retains its data and shows a “Missing connection” warning. Downstream nodes also retain data, and show a “Input data error” warning.

• Refreshing the data in one node now also refreshes the data in downstream nodes.

• Table footers now show if any filters are applied.

• You can now click “Join” in the column menu to initiate a join on the given column.

• Pressing the tab key in the SQL and JavaScript node editors now indents the code.

• The AI can now make any chart type available in the chart node.

• Users with a “viewer” role in their workspace now see canvases in a “detached mode” in which they can change filters and brushes, but their changes will not be saved.

• Many other error states have been improved, many other loading states are now cleaner, and many other bugs have been fixed.

And some functionality has been replaced or removed:

• The Where node has been removed. Existing Where nodes have been migrated to SQL nodes.

• The Select node has been removed in favor of a new “Columns” tab in the node settings sidebar. Existing Select nodes have been migrated to a Table node; you will have to re-select the intended columns.

• The main menu no longer has options to change language or color theme in the main menu, which did not work.

• Right-clicking nodes no longer has the “Flatten” option, which also did not work.

We’re excited to share a preview of the next generation of Observable Notebooks! Today’s technology preview release includes:

• Observable Notebook Kit - An open file format for notebooks, and accompanying open-source tooling for generating static sites

• Observable Desktop - A macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, and with a radical new approach to AI

You can learn more and download Observable Desktop by visiting the Notebooks 2.0 website.

• We’ve officially launched AI for canvases. Read the announcement.

• You can now make canvases with Databricks data sources.

• Added a beeswarm chart type.

• Adding a child to a node in a frame now creates the child in the frame.

• Sankey diagrams can now be sorted alphabetically or by size.

• The From nodes’ table selector now matches the left data panel and includes search.

• AI now stops its work if you switch pages and stops more reliably.

• The old deprecated Join node has been removed. If you have canvases still using the old Join node, you will have to reconnect their input edges to fix them.

• You can now make canvases with Postgres data sources.

• Expanded the choropleth to support either a U.S. or world base map.

• Added a dot strip chart type (a scatterplot with ordinal y and quantitative x).

• Sankey diagrams now default to sizing by count.

• Sankey diagrams now have options for filtering nulls and merging source and target.

• AI now understands more about bar charts, scatterplots, and treemaps.

• AI now remembers its last prompt and output even if you’ve panned away.

• AI now identifies nodes primarily by the same names you see and edit.

• Improved handling of BigInt and Time units in DuckDB sources.

• Fixed issue where you could add a broken DuckDB table before it had loaded.

• Fixed histograms’ multiline brush labels in Safari.

• The join node can now join to any table on the canvas (instead of just to database tables).

• Line charts support new options for binning intervals, axis labels, and axis ticks.

• Added a Sankey diagram chart type.

• AI is now more concise.

• AI now highlights questions for you to respond to.

• The JavaScript node’s CSS now matches notebooks’ CSS.

• Uploading a file to a DuckDB canvas no longer immediately adds the table to the canvas. (Click “+” beside a table in the data panel to add it.)

• Fixed AI to see nodes inside of frames.

• Fixed SQL parsing to support trailing comments.

• Fixed autocomplete clipping in JavaScript and SQL nodes.

• Fixed SQL and Derive nodes to re-run children after filtering.

• Nodes are now named by default. (Double-click the name in the header to edit.)

• You can now add a SQL node querying the selected node from the “+” menu.

• AI now puts its canvas work in a frame labeled with your prompt.

• AI now sees more detail to match what you see in column summaries.

• Updated fonts (Draw, Sans, Serif, and Mono) to better match notebooks.

• Fixed bug where summary charts of time columns would fail to load.

• Fixed Snowflake “Edit database” settings to remember password until reset.