Release Radar · End of 2023 Edition

Hacktoberfest has wrapped up, GitHub Universe has come to a close, and our community has been super hard at work. All the while people enjoyed turkey over Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada and expressed gratitude for those around them. In this edition, we’d like to thank the open source community for all the awesome projects shipped over the past two months. Everything from weekend projects, to cool artificial intelligence (AI) art, to world changing technology. This publication of the Release Radar covers a few projects that shipped major version updates over the past few months.

OctoArt 1.0

AI artwork has taken the world by storm, from beautiful backgrounds, to unique avatars, movie-benders, and more. Now you can use AI to generate stunning artwork featuring the GitHub logo. OctoArt calls users to write a prompt and have the AI generate a gorgeous picture for them. Try it out for yourself, and share your results on social media.

CLI for Microsoft 365 7.0

Having been featured in the November 2022 Release Radar, CLI for Microsoft 365 is back. A year on, there are significant changes to the CLI. The CLI is now interactive by default, meaning users will be prompted for any missing required information. The code base has been refactored and several commands have been renamed to be more consistent with other CLI tools. If you want to upgrade, check out the migration guide, and read up on all the changes in the blog post. The docs have also been updated, migrating over to Docusaurus, and using AI-based searching to give you faster, more accurate answers.

reNgine 2.0

Everyone would praise a streamlined process right? What if I said you can streamline your reconnaissance process for security professionals, penetration testers, and bug bounty hunters? reNgine will do just that. It’s a web application with configurable engines, data correlation capabilities, continuous monitoring, database-backed reconnaissance data, GPT powered reports, and an intuitive user interface. Version 2.0 includes the power of OpenAI’s GPT for report generation and attack surface generation. There’s also the ability to assign roles and permissions, and URL gathering is more efficient. Dig deeper into these, and all the changes in the release notes.

Inter 4.0

There’s been a lot of talk recently about accessibility. It affects everyone, and we all benefit from making accessible applications. Inter is a typeface crafted and designed for computer screens. The font features tall height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. The latest update is an accumulation of over two years work and includes the design of thousands of glyphs. There are six additional display designs and several new OpenType features. Download the font directly from the repository and start using it for better readability.

Rowy 3.0

We’ve featured Rowy in the September 2021 Release Radar. Since then, the team has worked hard to update Rowy. There have been over a hundred updates, and version 3.0 is the biggest release yet. It includes BuildShip, a visual API scheduled job and cloud functions builder. There are also new features, enhancements, and the usual bug fixes. Read all the changes in the Rowy release notes.

raylib 5.0

Are you a programmer and a gamer? Then you’ll love raylib. It’s a library for video game programming. Raylib is lightweight and supported on multiple platforms. The newest version brings the biggest redesign raylib has ever seen, offering better performance and simplifying the addition of new platforms. There’s a whole new back end support for SDL and Nintendo Switch, new APIs, support for 16-bit HDR images and textures, and lots more. Check out the entire Changelog for all the juicy details. Congratulations are also in store for the team as this year is their 10th anniversary 🥳.

Simple Data Analysis 2.0

If you’re a computational journalist, check out Simple Data Analysis. It’s a JavaScript library for data analysis. No longer switch between Python, R, and JavaScript. Instead use this library to bring all the best parts together. The new version has been completely rewritten to increase the library’s performance. Under the hood, it now uses DuckDB, meaning it runs six times faster! Check out the website and see how you could utilise this library.

🥳🥳 Published simple-data-analysis@v2 🥳🥳 Thanks to @duckdb's incredible work, it's now crazy fast to crunch data in JavaScript. Chart below shows how long it took to compute the avg temp per decade for 700+ cities from a 1.7 GB file! Go check the repo! https://t.co/F9mYruQEQo pic.twitter.com/raZ1cSSoRC

— Naël Shiab (@NaelShiab) November 30, 2023

Home Assistant Core 2023.12

We’ve spoken about releases before, noting not every project uses semantic versioning by number. Some use other conventions. One such project is Home Assistant, where they ship a major release each month and number it by the year and month. So here we have the 2023 December edition, posted in November for the month of December. Yes it can be a bit confusing, yet there are some super cool updates and we wanted to highlight this version. The login page has been redesigned, there’s a new thermostat card, more dashboards, new integrations, and so much more. Check out the blog post for all the changes, including integrations that are no longer available.

Release Radar October-December

Well, that’s all for this edition. Don’t forget to read more about what the community is up to on GitHub in our State of the Octoverse Report. This report covers everything from the most popular languages, fastest growing communities, artificial intelligence, and more.

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, regardless of whether you shipped your first 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 in August and September. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you’e 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.