Release Radar · November 2022 Edition

We promised we’d be back soon and here we are! There has been an incredible amount of open source projects shipping major version releases before the year wraps up. I can’t believe we are all saying that now. “When the year wraps up!” or “See you next year!” What happened to 2022? Well, we know the open source community was working hard all through this past year. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the State of the Octoverse report. And with that, let’s read up on this month’s Release Radar with projects that shipped major version updates this November.

CLI for Microsoft 365 6.0

As a Microsoft fan-girl, this is one of my favourites. You can manage all your Microsoft 365 tenant and SharePoint Frameworks. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows, macOS, Linux, Bash, or PowerShell. CLI for Microsoft 365 also allows you to build automation scripts. The latest update includes extended documentation with new commands for all your favourite Microsoft apps. There’s also new ways to configure how you want to display commands, and extended support for managing Power Platform. Check out all the changes in the release notes. Did you notice the website is powered by GitHub Pages 😉. Also congrats to CLI for Microsoft 365 for celebrating their fifth birthday 🎂🥳.

React95 4.0

More Microsoft fan-girling! I grew up in the days of Windows 95 and Clippy so this hits home nicely. React95 is a Windows 95 style UI component library for React. It gives you all the vibes and nostalgia from the ’90s. Version 4.0 has been completely written in TypeScript, and there’s a cool new Storybook theme. Check out all the changes in the release notes and try it out to relive your childhood.

React-PDF 6.0

Bit of a React theme this month too. React-PDF is a React library that easily renders and displays PDFs in React applications. The latest update brings the highly anticipated Vite support. There’s modern JavaScript by default, and support for Internet Explorer 11 has ended. Check out the release notes for all the changes. The team have also put together a handy migration guide.

Box CLI Maker 2.0

We’ve got some Microsoft, React, and now CLI themes running through this Release Radar. Box CLI Maker is another CLI tool, but this one allows you to make customisable terminal boxes. There are eight built in styles, 16 built in colours and true colour support. The latest version includes custom colour support, optimised code, and added support for the Windows Console—hooray for the Microsoft fan-girl in the room! Check out all the changes in the changelog, and remember to update to get all the new features.

Chart.js 4.0

For those JavaScript users out there, this one for you. Chart.js is a flexible, lightweight charting tool for designers and developers. It started in 2013, and has over 50,000 stars on GitHub 😮. It’s highly customisable, and comes with lots of default configurations, making it a lot easier to start. The new version has lots of updates, fixes, documentation changes, and more. Check them out in the release notes, along with a migration guide.

Nuxt 3.0

You might recognise the green Vue.js colour palette when you take a look at Nuxt. That’s because it’s an intuitive Vue Framework, providing developers with a better user experience. It’s fast, and uses on demand rendering to help build projects. The latest version is a modern rewrite of the full Nuxt framework. Based on Vite, Vue3, and Nitro, it now includes TypeScript support. There is a stable, production ready API, browser support, and support for Node.js 14, 16, 18, and 19. Check out all the changes on the website, and keep in touch with the community on the Nuxt GitHub Discussions.

Stable Diffusion 2.0

We promised you AI in the last Release Radar and we’re delivering. In the October Release Radar, we talked about InvokeAI as a stable diffusion project. Now, Stable Diffusion 2.0 has been released. These are models trained to use AI in the creation and modification of artwork. If you were at GitHub Universe, you would have seen Stable Diffusion in use at the AI art studio. This latest version includes better text to image models, and a new next encoder. If you haven’t come across any AI art yet, we encourage you to try it out.

Tesseract.js 4.0

With all the text to image tooling around AI artwork, it would be amiss of us not to mention image to text recognition. Tesseract.js is a JavaScript library that can analyse an image of text and extract that text in almost any language. This includes dozens of spoken languages. The latest version comes with lots of breaking changes, including preprocessing options for rotating images for better accuracy. Processed images can also be retrieved. For example, if an image has been rotated, or it’s in greyscale, they can now be analysed. Check out the changelog for all the updates.

Dependabot Changelog Helper 2.0

GitHub Actions is now one of the biggest CI/CD tools, allowing users to discover, create, and share actions to perform any job. There are thousands of GitHub Actions on the GitHub Marketplace. One such action is Dependabot Changelog Helper. Developers love Dependabot, and this action automatically updates your changelog with the relevant Dependabot package updates. The latest update makes a fundamental change to the action where it looks for new and unreleased versions of your dependencies. Check out the action on GitHub Marketplace and add it to your next project.

Revolt 1.0

PHP is currently one of the most popular languages on GitHub. With so many PHP applications out there, developers need a way to manage concurrent PHP apps. Revolt is an event loop to help manage multitasking. This means when a database is queried, instead of waiting for a single response, the application should (in theory) be able to handle multiple requests at once. Revolt helps this occur. Congratulations to the team on shipping your first major—stable—release 🥳.

Release Radar November

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 6.0. Good luck to all those who are packaging up their projects and pushing major version updates before the end of 2022.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects from October. 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 new Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.

Written by

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.