Drop #228 (2023-03-27): Nostalgic Pursuits 0.1.0
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Drop #228 (2023-03-27): Nostalgic Pursuits 0.1.0
Observable(HQ) Observations; Ruffle Progress Report & FlashArch; Bonus [Level] Unlocked!
Never let a good idiom go to waste! Semver. All. The. Drops! (Not really; I like coming up with groan-able taglines too much.)
This is a “check-in” edition, where we see what's up on various tech/topics we've previously covered since many have had some remarkable updates. We’ll refer to future Drops liks this with semver updated titles.
Observable(HQ) Observations
It's been almost a year since we introduced Observable, and we've touched on it a few times since, but they've been doing enough since the last mention to warrant a check-in.
Don't skip over this if you're thinking “oh, more javascript, yay”. While Observable-flavored javascript is what powers the site, our brave new, wild, WASM-ified world means that you've got access to seriously powerful non-JS tech to augment the creation of analyses, visualizations, and stories. Want to use python for data wrangling in Observable? Go right ahead! (R won't be far behind).
They've been on a tear lately, enhancing notebook capabilities at a frenetic pace. Startups tend to have “bursty” tech-improvement periods like this, but not all the new hotness lies in the javascript underpinning the cells.
Observable brought on Allison Horst as a “Data Scientist Advocate” in the Fall 2022. Allison is an excellent communicator, teacher, storyteller, and information designer. What I mean by that last attribute is that she has a remarkable capability of crafting visually appealing notebooks that are also packed with useful information to help you work with the platform. Here are a few of the most recent ones you should 👀:
A guide to UI design and notebook cloning disguised as a harmless waffle char
A Rosetta Stone notebook for doing stats across multiple languages
Another Rosetta Stone notebook, this time for data wrangling
One final, new feature is something I stumbled over this past weekend.
As mentioned in previous Drops, I've been playing with WebR in the form of “experiments”, which are crafted in publishing system I hacked together for rendering Markdown into DOM elements on-the-fly (with support for syntax highlighted code blocks). A recent experiment showed how to combine Lit components with WebR and Observable Plot.
I had yanked the data from the experiment and put it into a notebook to work on live styling of the Plot, and the platform offered to bring up a wizard to help craft the plot. I'm not a fan of drag & drop environments, but I am terminally curious. Here's what it looks like (inverted, so I don't blind y'all):
Pick the marks and styles, and it will both craft insertable javascript that uses Plot's “auto” mark to render the datavis. I still used my manual method of Plot creation, but left the wizard's work in the notebook to show you how well it works.
Ruffle Progress Report & FlashArch
We covered Ruffle — a Rust project that aims to resurrect all the things that used to work in the, now defunct, Adobe Flash Player — back in July 2022. While I do not personally care a whit about the vast selection of kitchy-to-addictive games that were all the rage in Flash land, I do care deeply about not losing access to the innovative and experimental data visualization and exploration tools built with them. (The previous post has more commentary on that.)
While the GitHub repo has been busy, much of the discussion of project progression is locked away in a Discord forum. Thankfully, the team released a progress update, which I encourage folks to check out. They appear to be incredibly excited about the progress of the project, and I'm 100% willing to transfer even a few clicks their way to continue to encourage the team.
If you don't remember much about Flash or truly grok how much was almost lost completely to time, head on over to FlashArch. It's a Flash game, animation, and visualization (not much of that last category is there presently) archive service launched in 2020. It was started to provide continuous execution through the emulator to replace Adobe Flash Player, which ended support as of December 31, 2020, and to preserve past domestic and foreign Flash materials from being destroyed on the Internet.
You can browse through the entire tagged and categorized collection, or upload any Flash projects you may have saved. It has a much nicer interface than The Internet Archive's Flash Archive, though it does get a great deal of its content from there.
Why not carve out some time to take in a sampling from their Recommended Collections to [re]kindle some “Oh, cool!” moments that came from many a SWF file?
Bonus [Level] Unlocked!
To (belatedly) celebrate curl's birthday, and due to a really not great post-spike protein invasion recovery caused Saturday, I'll close out our inaugural “nostalgia” Drop by unlocking Bonus Drop #3, which covers:
Once again, many thanks to the folks that make the Bonus Drops possible!
FIN
I'll close with an out-of-context link drop to a company that is literally trying to make human virtual “hamster wheels”. o_O ☮
#observable #flash #adobeflash #rust #ruffle