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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 05 Sep 2024, Week 36

F-Droid Core

The F-Droid Client version served by the huge blue button of the main homepage of the F-Droid website was just updated from 1.17 to the latest stable 1.20. As week 14 TWIF forebode, and the week 30 TWIF explained, newer Client versions introduced the “Other” anti-feature setting as an umbrella to cover whatever the future would bring. Unfortunately, updating the client would just add the new setting turned off by default, so apps flagged with such an anti-feature, eg. TetheredNet would not be shown in searches. A small banner on top of the results list mentions the hidden apps, but users might easily miss it. If your client was upgraded from an older version this year, you can just open the Settings page, find “Include anti-feature apps” entry and check “Other Anti-features”. But from now on, when you install F-Droid for the first time, from the blue button, this setting is already as it should be. More work is ongoing to polish the small banner, fix settings on client upgrades and integrate “TetheredNet” as a standalone anti-feature.

Community News

Hacktoberfest 2024, A month-long celebration of all things open-source, will be upon us soon. Former F-Droid contributors have setup a site to keep track of Android apps, around the community, that will join in. If you want to lend a hand to your favorite app, do bookmark the Droidtoberfest website and remember to get ready to contribute.

BobBall was updated to 1.17 after an 8 year hiatus. For Android 2.3.3 users there’s only bad news, no, it’s not about your Android being 13 years too old, it’s worse, the new BobBall works only on 4.0 and later. 😅

LibreTube was updated to 0.25.1 and now supports “local streams extraction” similar to NewPipe, as it contains a workaround for recent AntiBot protection changes by YouTube. The upstream issue contains more user experiences and info.

RHVoice – a free and open source speech synthesize was updated to 1.16.3 after 8 months of no updates as F-Droid contributors need to manually track when releases are ready. Updates are pretty important as the other well known TTS app, eSpeak, is already 2 years old and can’t even be installed on newer arm64-only or Android 14+ devices. RHVoice does not cover the same range of locales but provides some voice output to use.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed

LibreOffice 2022 Schedule and PyConZA 2021, program apps for older conferences

Newly Added Apps

5 apps were newly added
  • Citrine: Nostr relay for Android
  • Code Rain Wallpaper: A live wallpaper inspired by the matrix falling code effect
  • Image Meta Cleaner: a cross-platform application designed to Show and Remove metadata from images
  • Ion Launcher: A beautiful, functional and customizable launcher
  • Mensinator: Tailored Period Tracking, Total Privacy—Your Period, Your Control

Updated Apps

94 more apps were updated

(expand for the full list)

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Windows App SDK 1.6 released

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We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your package, or quality of life improvements for controls like PipsPager and RatingControl, WinAppSDK 1.6 offers a raft of new features, performance boosts and structural changes that enable you to make your native Windows apps better than ever before.  The Windows App SDK provides a rich set of APIs and tools to help you build beautiful and fast Windows desktop apps, including any C++ Win32 or C# .NET app. You can harness the modern controls and polish of WinUI 3, which ships as part of the WinAppSDK, or if you have an existing app that uses Win32 such as WPF, you can take advantage of only the parts of the SDK that you need. The WinAppSDK also stays up to date with frequent and OS-independent releases so your app can always access the latest innovations. ↫ Duncan MacMichael at the Windows Blogs There’s actually quite a few nice and welcome updates in version 1.6, most prominently the aforementioned Native AOT. This stands for native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and, as the name suggests, compiles your application ahead of time for the architecture it’s going to run on. This reduces the size of the application package and greatly improves the startup time. Another welcome improvement is that the embedded Edge WebView2 SDK is no longer hard-coded, but a NuGet reference, so developers can choose to use any version of the webview they want, preferably the newest version. There’s a lot more in here, so if you’re a Windows developer trying to use the latest set of tools from Microsoft – this one’s for you.

Towards Factory

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#maliamjad #vibes #content #behance #blender3d #perseverance #creators #c4d #effort #influence #shortvideo #enter_imagination #audience #entreprendre #mograph #animations #visualgraphic #visualeffects #adobeaftereffects #reussir #thumbnail #motionlovers #socialmediaexperts #realworld #aftereffect #c4dart #entrepreneusescreatives #graphicdesignersclub #computergraphics #contentmanagement #digitallife

Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “How computer-marked quizzes can best help students learn” on Wednesday 18th September, 12:00 UTC

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Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “How computer-marked quizzes can best help students learn” on Wednesday 18th September, 12:00 UTC
by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for the Moodle Academy free webinar “How computer-marked quizzes can best help students learn” on Wednesday 18th September at 12:00-13:00 UTC.

At this webinar, we will welcome Tim Hunt, Senior Developer at the Open University.

This talk will be divided in two sections, a theoretical part and a practical part. Tim will start by talking about what is most important in our use of Moodle: teaching and learning. Considering what is known about how education works, when can computer-marked question be a good thing to include in your course, and which ways of using them are likely to be most effective?

After establishing how quizzes can contribute to good course design in general, Tim will then talk about some of the features of the Moodle quiz and question bank which let you realise those ideas in practice. However, when implementing technology in schools and universities, it must work for the people involved, in the time they have available, and the institution must be able to administer that use at large scale. Therefore, to be effective, software like Moodle must balance the educational needs with other requirements.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars‘. You have to be enrolled in the course to register and join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “How computer-marked quizzes can best help students learn” on Wednesday 18th September, 12:00 UTC

Kanopi Studios: Default Content in Drupal

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In Drupal 10.3, the DefaultContent API was added to Drupal core as part of the experimental Recipes APIs. These APIs allow Drupal to create content from files that are part of a recipe. This content that we programmatically create isn’t intended for deploying or migrating content, we have the Workspaces and other modules for that. […]

The post Default Content in Drupal appeared first on Kanopi Studios.

Android 15 is released to AOSP

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Today we’re releasing Android 15 and making the source code available at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Android 15 will be available on supported Pixel devices in the coming weeks, as well as on select devices from Samsung, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo, and Xiaomi in the coming months. We’re proud to continue our work in open source through the AOSP. Open source allows anyone to build upon and contribute to Android, resulting in devices that are more diverse and innovative. You can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem. You can even examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works. ↫ Matthew McCullough at the Android Developers blog While it’s great that we’re still getting open source Android releases, the reality of it is that Google has eroded so much away from the Android Open Source Project that AOSP has become effectively useless. Back in the olden days, AOSP was a complete mobile operating system, but those days are long behind us. Google has moved so much from AOSP over to proprietary frameworks, applications, and cloud services that running that it’s no longer a complete package, which is a huge shame. Still, AOSP plays an important role for the custom ROM community and the various companies and communities making privacy-first, de-Googled Android versions, and for that reason alone it’s good that it still exists, even in its gutted state. Android 15’s AOSP release will surely find its way to LineageOS, /e/OS, GrapheneOS, and the countless other alternatives to butchered Android OEM versions and people seeking a more private smartphone experience. As for when Android 15 will hit Pixels – that’s going to be a few weeks from now, later than usual after the source release.