Release Radar · November 2020 Edition

We’re here to bring you the latest and greatest releases for November 2020. These are exciting new releases from some of the coolest projects around. There’s everything from world-changing tech to weekend hobbies. The best part about these releases: they’re all you. These are projects shipped by amazing developers from the open source community. Although there are many projects released every month, we don’t have enough blog space to capture everything, so we selected a handful of awesome examples. Turn on the coffee machine, grab a piece of cake, and settle in to read our top picks.

Tile Board 2.0

Home Assistant is one of the top open source projects on GitHub. Tile Board is a simple, yet highly customisable dashboard for Home Assistant. Version 2.0 comes with a bunch of bug fixes, stability on FireFox, and more ways to customise your look. The background has some neat updates in order to make the iframe look much snazzier. One of the best things about Tile Board: you don’t need a lot of JavaScript or HTML knowledge to get up and running. Give it a go and show us your customisations.

Charm 1.0

Congrats to Charm on launching version 1.0. Charm is a tool to make your command line look glamorous. I’m already loving the names for their products – Glow, Glamour, Bubble Tea, Bubbles, and Termenv. Anyone who knows me knows I love shiny things. Charm is certainly shiny, bubbly, funky, and fun. Also, whoever does their graphics design needs to get in touch with us. Charm has the cutest mascots!! Once you have Charm you can make everything look pretty, colourful, and oh so beautiful. Perfecting timing too with all the awesome CLI tools out there right now (hint, hint) – see GitHub Command Line. 😁

Babylon.js 4.2

This one is massive and it was released only 17 hours before writing this post! There’s a heap of major updates to Babylon.js, the powerful and simple web rendering engine. Version 4.2 brings with it additions to the particle and sprite editors, updates for texture rendering, several new fancy features to play with, and tonnes of additional support. Read all the updates on their changelog and head over to the Babylon website to play with their demos.

Jetpack 9.0

Want to increase your web traffic, see your stats, and protect yourself from hackers all at the same time? Then you need Jetpack. It’s for all your WordPress sites and gives you lots of built-in performance, security, and customisation. Version 9.0 gives you the ability to publish the entire content of your WordPress posts to Twitter as threads. There’s also more support for custom CSS and lots of enhancements to the dashboard. Check out all the changes and improvements on the Jetpack repo.

Next.js 10.0

We’ve been having lots of fun with Next.js over here at GitHub. Bdougie recently spoke with Tim Neutkens from Next.js. The team are doing some really cool things. With version 10.0, Next.js has made a multitude of changes. There’s core changes, documentation changes, and example changes. Support for images is a big feature, as well as updates and optimisation for your favourite features. Read the Next.js changelog for all the updates. If you missed the amazing Open Source Friday conversation with Brian and Tim, carve out some time to watch the interview.

GraphQL Editor 3.0

Do you want to GraphQL better? GraphQL Editor is your ticket to creating apps faster. It’s the ultimate tool for advanced and new users, and according to the team, GraphQL Editor 3.0 is, according to the team, “the biggest release” ever. There’s a bunch of new features and improvements to the interface. You’ll find the editor now has an “organiser mode”. This allows you to create and browse the schema much faster. It also looks really pretty. Faker is one of GraphQL Editor’s most-loved features. The new version makes a few improvements to Faker by allowing users to specify faker values from faker.js and it has dark theme… Ooooo. Everyone needs a dark theme! So check out all the awesome changes to GraphQL Editor and try it out for free.

Rasa 2.0

Looking for an open source machine learning framework to automate text-based and voice-based conversations? Look no further than Rasa. You can use Rasa to build context assistants with many of your favourite channels like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Google Hangouts, Twilio, Alexa, and more. Release 2.0 comes with added templates, threads, new command line arguments, support for more features, and the removal of a lot of deprecated components. If you’ve got some machine learning skills and are looking to get involved in an open source project, this might be a good one for you. Seems like Rasa treats their contributors really well and sends them lots of cute swag, to boot!

This arrived in the mail today! 💜 All the way from 🇩🇪 to 🇿🇦. Thank you @Rasa_HQ for the contributor acknowledgement. Much appreciated. #Rasa #RasaNLP #RasaCommunity #chatbots #ai #nlu #nlp #chatbot pic.twitter.com/b90e5Brx2u

— Cobus Greyling (@CobusGreylingZA) October 26, 2020

Create React App 4.0

It’s time to setup a modern web app using only one command. That’s what Create React App does. You can get started in seconds and there’s less to learn while you’re at it. Release 4.0 has new features and includes support for fast refresh. There’s support for React 17 and TypeScript 4.0 too. The Create React App changelog is super detailed and lists all the major changes, bug fixes, and enhancements. Read up on it and start creating apps today.

Krita 4.4

This is the free and open source cross-platform digital painting platform. With Krita, you’ll have an application offering end-to-end solutions for creating digital art files on the KDE and Qt frameworks. Did we mention you can use it for digital artwork created from scratch? Krita 4.4 comes with heaps of neat tools like new fill layer types, options for different brushes, textures, support for dynamic colours, and many more. There’s a tonne of fixes for using Krita on ChromeOS and Android. Check out the new updates and unleash your inner creative vibes.

PyGame 2.0

Not only is PyGame 2.0 out, it’s the 20th birthday of PyGame! Give them a round of applause. Good thing PyGame is here just in time for GitHub Game Off. Version 2.0 has backwards compatibility and 3,306 changes. That’s a tonne of changes! The TL;DR for these include support for many different hardware accelerated video APIs, better support for PyPy, touch support, audio input support, message alert boxes, better keyboard and controller support, better image and audio support, Android support, and more. The defining theme of PyGame 2.0 is “better support”. Check out all 3,306 changes on their changelog.

November Release Radar

Well that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, whether it was version 1.0 or version 9.0. Keep them coming people. Remember to check out the awesome project releases from our October Release Radar. If you’ve got a new release coming we’d love to see. Use GHReleaseRadar the next time you share your release on socials. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out. Happy coding.

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.