New beta: Vega-Lite block

[Kasra]

Hello!

Vega-Lite is a library for creating sophisticated charts, visualizations, and interactive graphics.

The new Vega-Lite block brings the power of this library into your base.

→ Click here to join the beta. Once you click that link, the “Vega-Lite” block will be available in the list of blocks when you go to install a block.

We’d love your feedback – please reply with thoughts and suggestions in this thread!

P.S. we’ll be open sourcing this block in the next week or two, stay tuned.

[Bill_French]

Kasra:

does the editor feel any faster now? We made some tweaks that should hopefully help.

I noticed absolutely no difference on my 64GB Mac; it’s blistering fast then and now. :winking_face:

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

@Kasra
Yes, it definitely does feel faster now. I don’t remember exactly what all applications I might have had running while trying to work with the block the first time when I expressed my frustration, so I’m likely not able to make a perfect comparison to that state… but with what I have open right now, I can say that I was not frustrated with choppiness in the editor while the graph tried to re-render on the fly.

So thank you!

@Bill.French … we get it … you’ve got a biiiiiiiiiiig computer :winking_face: :laughing:

[Bill_French]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

you’ve got a biiiiiiiiiiig computer

And yet, it feels so tiny when I try to process the person count of an image with 100,000 people in it.

[Jennifer_Bird]

Is it possible to get access to this still? I’d love to play around with it but I can’t install it on my dashboard, it doesn’t show up in the blocks…

[Tanya_Payne]

The coding panel jumps around constantly for me- is this due to my computer capability? Any suggestions to improve it? Thanks!

[Felix_Fabich]

Which version of Vega-Lite is used by this app?

[Ahmed_Alumran]

Does Airtable’s Vega Lite app allow for interactivity, as shown in this Python API (Altair, see Github) that translates into the JSON script for the chart:

alt.Chart(source).mark_circle(size=60).encode(
x=‘Horsepower’,
y=‘Miles_per_Gallon’,
color=‘Origin’,
tooltip=[‘Name’, ‘Origin’, ‘Horsepower’, ‘Miles_per_Gallon’]
).interactive()

[Bill_French]

Ahmed_Alumran:

Does Airtable’s Vega Lite app allow for interactivity

I believe it will work as long as it is supported in VegaLite.

[Christopher_Wi1]

Has anyone experienced a glitchy behavior with the scripting in the Vega-Lite block? It seems when I’m editing the script, Airtable starts to do lots of auto saves which, make it impossible to work in the Vega-Lite script at that point. I have to close the block and reopen but doesn’t seem to fix. Also, I’m in the browser (Chrome). Not sure if it would be different in the desktop app.

[Jonathan_Kau]

It appears as though properties such as “repeat” and “layer” are no longer permitted with the Vega Lite block. Is this on purpose? If so, the basic use case of a line graph with multiple series is no longer possible.