Hi there! I'm Allison, I've spent lots of time working in R, R Markdown, and more recently Quarto for environmental data science work & teaching. Working in Quarto is actually what introduced me to Observable ("what is this 'OJS' business?")! Now I'm a Developer Marketing Manager at Observable and am really enjoying working in Observable Framework.
I still love Quarto. It lets me tinker, explore & troubleshoot in R easily while building things (I still have a bit of a hard time troubleshooting data loaders). I like that I can use Quarto for dashboards, but also for a personal blog, a scientific article, a nicely formatted PDF, etc. -- it feels like I only need to know one system to be able to create a bunch of different products. There are options for people like me who are more data scientist, less developer to quickly customize some biggies like fonts, background colors, etc. right in the yaml. There are really nice helpers (e.g. for cross referencing and citations, among others) that are great for researchers.
What I like about Observable Framework is that getting started is so fast - minutes from install, to a dashboard I can preview & update locally, to deploy - with really clear prompts to walk me through it. I do really like data loaders. It feels better to just prep my data in an R script (or Python, or whatever else), then access the data I need from the loader (rather than to pass outputs from R code to an OJS cell in Quarto). Using any JS libraries and components feels more streamlined in Observable Framework (not sure why - the syntax isn't that different, though Framework uses import rather than require now). And dashboard layouts are easier for me in Framework using our grid class.
I like how focused Observable Framework feels. Quarto feels awesome with is breadth of possibilities (output to PDF, or Word, or slides, or blogs, or ebooks, or websites, or ...!), whereas Framework feels sleek in its focus and design for developers creating beautiful, fast data apps & dashboards.
I still love Quarto. It lets me tinker, explore & troubleshoot in R easily while building things (I still have a bit of a hard time troubleshooting data loaders). I like that I can use Quarto for dashboards, but also for a personal blog, a scientific article, a nicely formatted PDF, etc. -- it feels like I only need to know one system to be able to create a bunch of different products. There are options for people like me who are more data scientist, less developer to quickly customize some biggies like fonts, background colors, etc. right in the yaml. There are really nice helpers (e.g. for cross referencing and citations, among others) that are great for researchers.
What I like about Observable Framework is that getting started is so fast - minutes from install, to a dashboard I can preview & update locally, to deploy - with really clear prompts to walk me through it. I do really like data loaders. It feels better to just prep my data in an R script (or Python, or whatever else), then access the data I need from the loader (rather than to pass outputs from R code to an OJS cell in Quarto). Using any JS libraries and components feels more streamlined in Observable Framework (not sure why - the syntax isn't that different, though Framework uses import rather than require now). And dashboard layouts are easier for me in Framework using our grid class.
I like how focused Observable Framework feels. Quarto feels awesome with is breadth of possibilities (output to PDF, or Word, or slides, or blogs, or ebooks, or websites, or ...!), whereas Framework feels sleek in its focus and design for developers creating beautiful, fast data apps & dashboards.