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Release Radar, Festive Edition · December 2022 – January 2023

Welcome to our special edition of the Release Radar 🎄. Between Christmas festivities, end of the year parties, Chinese New Year, or simply enjoying some time off, almost everyone has…

·@MishManners
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Welcome to our special edition of the Release Radar 🎄. Between Christmas festivities, end of the year parties, Chinese New Year, or simply enjoying some time off, almost everyone has been celebrating – us too! Now we’re taking a moment to celebrate these awesome open source projects that shipped major version releases during December and January.

GitHub Unwrapped 2022

Let’s start with a super festive 🎁 open source project. If you were following social media over the holidays, you might have seen the #GitHubUnwrapped videos on various platforms. Each year, GitHub Unwrapped gives you stats and highlights on your year in code. The project is built by the same team behind Remotion, featured in our April 2021 and 2022 Release Radars. It’s not too late to take a look back on your open source contributions. Head to the website and enter your GitHub username to download your unique video.

Vite 4.0

Since we featured Vite in the July 2022 Release Radar, it’s only fitting we showcase it again for this one. With five months between ships, the team has been hard at work whilst the ecosystem surrounding Vite grows. This latest version brings new CLI shortcuts, support for patch-patch, cleaner build logs, improved error messaging and a lot more. The whole system is built to work faster and there are new plugins. Whilst the changes aren’t as big in scope as Vite 3, Vite 4 now uses Rollup 3. Uses should also experience a much smoother upgrade as the team has focused a lot of their efforts on migration. Check out the blog for more information on Vite 4, and the migration guide to ensure you’re up to date.

SWR 2.0

Who doesn’t like React? There’s usually at least one React-based project every Release Radar, and this edition is no different. SWR is a React data fetching library. Made by the team at Vercel, SWR allows components to fetch, cache, and mutate data. This latest version includes improved UI capabilities, new mutation APIs, more DevTools, and better support for concurrent rendering. Check out the team’s blog post for all the updates.

React Virtuoso 4.0

Ooo more React projects! React Virtuoso is a React components library for rendering large data sets. The latest release allows for two generics (both data and context) to be added to the Components interface, as well as the usual bug fixes. There are a few other updates and you can read about them all in the changelog.

AMPHP 3.0

You’ve probably noted PHP pop up in several of our Release Radars. AMPHP is a collection of libraries for PHP. They are all event driven and allow for multiple events, meaning you can run lots of processes at once. You know that means building faster right?! The latest update ensures AMPHP no longer ships its own event loop. The project is now also based on Revolt. You can check out all the updates, including a bunch of syntax changes in the release notes.

DiceBear 5.0

Everyone wants custom avatars for almost everything. Social media profiles, video game characters, even Twilio has cute user avatars. DiceBear makes it easier for you to create custom avatars for anything you like. Start with a specific style, and design your way to a beautiful avatar. With the latest version, there are six new avatar styles to choose from. This new update also brings the Playground, where you can build, test, or play around with various avatars. Warning: you could spend hours here!

Typed RPC 3.0

Typescript is fast becoming one of the top used languages on GitHub. If you’re in this expanding group of GitHub users, then you’ll want to think about typed-rpc. It’s a lightweight, remote, procedure call protocol for Typescript. It has no dependencies, no batch requests, no transports, no runtime, and no extra fancy “fluff”. It’s pure and simple. Forgoing these extra “unnecessary”, bulky features, type-rpc turns out to be less than one kilobyte 🤯 and it’s super fast. Check out the release notes to see some of the new support features.

neo.mjs 5.0

We featured neo.mjs in the March 2022 Release Radar. In just under a year, the team is back with their next major update. This JavaScript framework for web applications is now faster and more efficient than ever. The latest version uses functions that enhance class prototypes at run time. The team has also simplified the class config system, and added a Google Maps wrapper component. Check out all the changes—to the approximately 50,000 lines of code—in the blog post.

Google Maps wrapper component.

Neo4-j Migrations 2.0

Another Neo, yet very different. Neo4j-Migrations is a set of database refactoring tools for Neo4j. These tools provide a uniform way for applications to apply changes to the database. This new release uses Java 17, enabling the project to use the latest and great version of GraalVM. There’s new (and very beautifully rendered) documentation, some refactorings, and the usual bug fixes. The code base is now more refined, meaning the project is a little more lightweight, which equals speed! Check out the wealth of changes in the changelog.

ToolJet 2.0

After featuring ToolJet in the February 2022 Release Radar—and having contributed to the project myself—it seems fitting we showcase this great product again. ToolJet is a low-code, drag and drop application that’s great for building applications. The latest release includes a fresh look user interface, new built-in no-code database, support for multi-page applications, and lots more. You can read about all the changes, updates, and more in the blog post. Did you know the team gained over 10,000 repo stars in 2022 🤩?!

Blaze 3.0

You want your friend to Airdrop you some photos from their phone. But that friend (AKA me) only has an Android. You start having a conversation about which file sharing app is better, and who has logins to which systems… the whole thing is too hard. Sound familiar? Introducing Blaze, the peer to peer file- sharing application that runs on the web. And as a HUGE plus, you can drop multiple photos to all your friends at once! Since it’s web-based, there’s no issue with operating systems or devices. Oh and did we mention there’s no account creation and no signup?! The latest version of Blaze includes local sharing (yay for transferring files between computers), better settings, a slick UI and sweet animations.

ShareX 15.0

These days, many people are content creators. Even if you’re not shipping videos to social media, you probably still use screen recordings for demos, workshops, or documentation. That’s where ShareX comes in. It allows you to capture any part of your screen with the touch of a button. You can then add images, text, effects, and other files to your recording. The newest release includes dark mode, a new “pin to screen” feature, an annotation tool, and lots more. Check out the changelog for all the changes. Fun fact: ShareX is using GitHub Actions for their releases! You can read about how to automatically generate release notes for your project, and how to automatically ship releases.

Capture, edit, add effects, upload, download, combine images and more with ShareX.

Roadmap 1.0

From the team who bought you Rowy, we present you with Roadmap. It’s a voting application where users can provide feedback, and vote on features they would like to see. No longer will you need to contemplate which features your team needs to work on and whether something is a good idea. Check out the website to have a play around with a demo. Congrats to the team on shipping out the first major version 🥳.

Vote on your favourite feature.

FullCalendar 6.0

The word “calendar” is often associated with the start or end of the year. People are organising their calendars, scheduling events, and planning the next big holiday (or not). If you’re planning out your year, and you have any sort of calendar on your website—maybe for showing meetups, or events—then you’ll want to think about FullCalendar, a full sized, drag and drop calendar in JavaScript. You can schedule events, see resources, and select various timelines. The latest release is much more stable, having solved some bugs related to installing FullCalendar. Check out the release notes for all the changes, as well as a guide on upgrading to the latest version.

Neon Resurgence 1.0

We couldn’t end our December Release Radar edition without featuring the winner of the GitHub Game Off. The theme for 2022 was “cliché”. We had hundreds of entries, and the winners were announced last month. You can check out all the winners in the blog post and see over 500 entries. Neon Resurgence won the overall Game Off and scored very highly in several categories. It’s a fun game where you will lose the ability to control your character. Warning, it can also be addictive. Try it out, check out the repository, and see all the results of the game jam.

Release Radar Festive Edition

Well, that’s all for our special holiday edition release picks. Congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, whether it was version 1.0 or version 15.0. If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects from November.

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 our Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.

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Written by

Michelle Mannering

Michelle Mannering

@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.

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