Release Radar · July 2023 Edition

After the last Release Radar, I promised the next one wouldn’t be far away, so here it is. This is the low down on some of the best open source projects that shipped major version updates in July. There’s lots of cool stuff from natural language processing, to APIs, money, and SDKs. I won’t spoil it all now, so read on to find out more about these projects, discover something new, and maybe find a new repository you can contribute to.

Octokit.js 3.0

If you want to do anything with GitHub’s API, then Octokit.js is your friend. Octokit.js is GitHub’s SDK for Browsers, Node.js, and Deno. It includes libraries for the API client, App client, and Action client. The latest version drops support for Node.js 14 and 16. If you rely on Octokit, check out the breaking changes and how it’ll affect you.

Wavesurfer.js 7.0

Featured in the May 2021 Release Radar, Wavesurfer.js is an audio visualisation library for creating waveforms. By adding in some HTML, you can create pretty looking interactive and responsive waveforms on your website. The newest version of Wavesurfer.js is a TypeScript rewrite. This brings a better developer experience, enhanced performance, and new plugins. Check out all the cool new features and read through how to upgrade from version 6.0 in the release notes.

Spark NLP 5.0

Last month’s Release Radar featured a lot of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s really a hot topic. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI focusing on speech to text recognition. It also includes the understanding of text and spoken language. From John Snow Labs comes Spark NLP. This NLP is state of the art and helps deliver scalable Large Language Models (LLMs). The latest update introduces support for ONNX Runtime, text embedding, document similarity ranking, and more. Deep dive into all the changes and how these changes affect the training models, performance, and beyond.

Remotion 4.0

This fun project has been featured in the April 2021, and April 2022 Release Radars. Remotion is used by us in the GitHub Unwrapped end of year celebration videos. Remotion is a framework for creating videos using React. The latest update is Remotion’s biggest yet. There’s significant improvements to the workflow, the introduction of the Remotion Studio, and it’s now powered by Rust. A few other features are sure to tempt you into trying the latest version including new packages, upgraded templates, new API, additional fonts, and more. Read up on all the key changes in the Remotion blog.

Whisky 1.0

Some of us like a good whiskey. And no, sorry, this isn’t that kind of whiskey, but it’s almost as good. Whisky is a modern wine wrapper for macOS – see what they did there. Even their repository is full of nods to popular beverages. The UI fits seamlessly into macOS—where you can make and manage bottles. From there you can install and run Windows games, and start experiencing the full power of your Apple machine. It’s on Homebrew and can be quickly installed from the command line. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🥳.

QrcodeReader 5.0

Quick Response (QR) codes were first released in 1994. Since COVID-19, the popularity of QR codes have been on the rise. From checking into a venue, scanning a billboard, or ordering food, QR codes are making access to websites and apps much quicker and easier. Qrcode Reader is a set of Vue.js components that allow people to detect and decode QR codes without leaving the browser. You can even drag and drop QR codes and see where it’s routing. The new version even detects multiple QR codes are once.

Prettier 3.0

Yes, we featured Prettier VSCode in the September 2021 Release Radar, and no, this is not the same thing. Albeit they are similar, and built by the same open source organisation: Prettier. Prettier VSCode makes your code look better by enforcing a consistent style – in VSCode. Prettier on the other hand does the same thing, but everywhere. For example, you could use Prettier in Markdown:

[![code style: prettier](https://img.shields.io/badge/code_style-prettier-ff69b4.svg?style=flat-square)](https://github.com/prettier/prettier)

The latest version of Prettier brings changes to the way Prettier is used in Markdown, support for various plugins, making the use of Prettier in CSS less confusing, and more. Read all about the major, breaking changes, requirements for Node.js 14 or higher, and understand how better to use emojis 😀 in the Prettier blog post.

I hate money 6.0

Sharing a house? Trying to split a bill at a restaurant? Going on a holiday with friends? Money allows us to do a lot of fun things. What people don’t enjoy about money however, is the stress around managing shared budgets. I hate money aims to manage shared expenses for you so you can spend more time coding and less time worrying about budgets. The latest version adds support for Python 3.11, and includes lots of new spoken languages. There’s now a QR code to easily invite people and some neater UI/UX around editing and removing expenses.

Flux 2.0

Kubernetes is one of the most popular open source projects on the planet. The project also just hit their ten-year anniversary! A project that size usually encourages others to build tools for, or on top of it. Flux is one such tool. Flux keeps Kubernetes clusters in sync with sources of configuration such as git repositories. The tool also automatically updates configurations when new code is deployed. The latest version of Flux is built to use Kubernetes’ API extension system, and to integrate with Prometheus and other core components of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Check out all the changes in the release notes.

We're thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) release of Flux v2.0.0! 🥳

It's been an incredible journey since April 2020, and we're grateful for your support. 🤗

Explore the latest release, changelog and upgrade guide here: https://t.co/hzStRo5Ub1

— Flux Project (@fluxcd) July 5, 2023

Kubevirt 1.0

Here, we have another Kubernetes project in KubeVirt. This is a virtual machine (VM) management add-on for Kubernetes. Essentially, KubeVirt extends Kubernetes by enabling resource management. With KubeVirt, you can create a predefined VM, schedule a VM on a Kubernetes cluster, and launch, stop, or delete a VM. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🥳.

Release Radar July

Well, that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Thank you to everyone who submitted a project to be featured. We loved reading all about the great things you’re all working on. Whether your project was featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release. It doesn’t matter if this was your project’s first version, or you launched 7.0.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects this Spring. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you are working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we’d love to hear from you. Check out the Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.

Written by

Michelle Duke

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.