Pie charts, histograms & new blocks for more interactive apps

Pie charts

Visualization experts will tell you all about why you shouldn't use pie charts to present your data. But let’s be honest, the pie is a staple of dashboards and your stakeholders often expect them. We have good news: you can now easily create those pie charts in our native chart blocks! Simply select Pie chart in the Type selector and configure your slices with two clicks!

The new chart type comes with its own customization options under the Format tab. You can switch between absolute and relative views (switch Show as to ‘Percentage’); or change where you position the value labels in the Position dropdown. What’s more, you can easily turn your pie into a doughnut by adjusting the Center gap in your chart. Happy baking!

Histograms

We also added another chart type to the roster: histograms! Yes, you could already create histograms in our bar charts, but it was a bit too finicky a process and many of you requested a simpler way to create these visualizations. We listened and made it as easy as possible: just pick the new Histogram chartfrom the type selector and select a single column - that’s it! If you need to customize the chart, you can adjust the binning parameters by clicking on the BIN selector. Here’s to quicker basic data exploration!

New blocks types

Blocks are kind of a big deal in Deepnote and we just added not one, but 4 brand new block types so you can build more appealing and interactive Apps!

Text area input: a more spacious input block that can nicely accommodate multi-line texts.

File upload: this powerful input block enables your consumers to upload and process their own data in your Apps with ease.

Button: a customizable button that makes submitting input changes a lot clearer and easier for your App consumers.

Separator: a handy new text block type for better visual separation of content. Tip: you can also type three dashes ‘—-’ to insert a separator.

We hope these new building blocks will turn your Apps even more powerful and can’t wait to see what you will build with them!

Simplified hardware sidebar

We also made a small, but important to change to the environment configuration experience in your notebooks. Gone are the days when you had to hunt for your machine configuration and other environment-related options in a tucked away settings submenu: these often used controls are now always visible in the left side panel.