Category: News

Moodle Product Showcase Shorts: Get a sneak peek at Moodle LMS 4.4!

Posted on by Michael G
by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’.

We’ve entered code freeze and our QA testing has now started, which can only mean one thing… A new release of Moodle LMS is coming soon! (on April 22nd, to be exact)

Here are a few sneak peeks at some of the new functionality you can expect to see:

Introducing our new look icons & sections

Taking into account valuable input from the community, we’re polishing the default course appearance by introducing sections to Moodle LMS 4.4. We’ve fine-tuned the styling for better consistency and improved accessibility, making navigation smoother for all users.

As part of this refinement, we’ve given the Activity icons a lighter makeover to tone down their prominence on the page. Plus, we’ve adjusted the colour palette to ensure better accessibility for users with colour vision deficiency. Our palette underwent rigorous testing against the four most prevalent forms of colour vision deficiency to ensure an optimised experience for all users.

More options & a smoother user set-up experience for Multi-factor Authentication

Expect continuous improvements to the Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) tools introduced in our last update. In Moodle LMS 4.4, setting up security is even easier for users. Plus, users will now be able to get MFA codes sent via SMS, giving security-conscious folks even more options to choose from.

Bulk actions for user pages, a Moodle Workplace feature, is coming to Moodle LMS

Thanks to the hard work of the Moodle Workplace team, improvements are coming to the ‘Browse list of users’ page in Moodle LMS 4.4. The lists will be able to be filtered more easily, and functionality for bulk user actions is being introduced.

 

Out-of-the-box access to the ‘Ordering Question Type’ functionality in Quiz 

A fan favourite, the Ordering question type plugin will be seamlessly integrated into Moodle core in 4.4. This means updated code for modern usability and improved accessibility. Plus, upgrading is a breeze with a seamless migration path in place. Big shoutout to the Moodle Users Association (MUA) for sponsoring this fantastic feature and to our community contributor, the legend Gordon Bateson, for creating it in the first place!

The Moodle LMS 4.4 release is not the only thing keeping us busy across Moodle Products!

We are also getting ready for the release of Moodle Workplace 4.4 (scheduled for a few weeks after the Moodle LMS release), which will include our new Course Catalogue functionality; you can see it in action in this video:

And, we are continuing to improve the user experience in our Mobile Applications; for a big round-up on a range of new features, check this video:

 

Last but not least, for our Moodle Community Developers, our journey to continuously improve your developer experience continues. Find out how by watching this:

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’; we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Product Team

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Maximizing Learning and Networking: Insights from DrupalCamp New Jersey

Posted on by Michael G
Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Maximizing Learning and Networking: Insights from DrupalCamp New Jersey

A DrupalCamp is a one- or two-day event that centers on the Drupal open source web content management system, and tends to bring together people from a geographical region. The goals are primarily, of course, knowledge sharing and increasing awareness of and helping to grow the Drupal community. It’s not easy to do this without also increasing awareness and knowledge of the tools we all use along with Drupal as well, which makes the gatherings all the more valuable.

pspp @ Savannah: PSPP 2.0.1 has been released

Posted on by Michael G

I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP.  PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data.  It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

Changes from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1:

  • Bug fixes.
  • Translation updates.

Please send PSPP bug reports to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org.

Bookworms in our machines

Posted on by Michael G

TWIF generated on Thursday, 21 Mar 2024, Week 12

F-Droid core

Last week’s TWIF was rather short in entertaining app info, but with a reason. Albeit F-Droid is distro agnostic and should work just fine with any, the main infrastructure is developed around Debian given that both projects have aligned goals when it comes to software freedom. Our “F-Droid maintains in Debian” post dives deeper into this.

Latest Debian version is 12, codenamed Bookworm and was launched last year. Current F-Droid infrastructure is still based on the previous version codenamed Bullseye. Last Thursday we’ve started the process to upgrade to Bookworm, in more of the places this needs to happen, be it Gitlab CI, main build server, contributors servers, websites, etc. As the process is done live during/between the running build cycles, things are not yet in sync, hence the main server has built less apps than usual as metadata recipes are adapted to run on the new updated system. For example, previous Bullseye had Java 11 by default and we can install Java 17 as needed, but newer Bookworm has Java 17 by default and older Java 11 needs to be added for all the apps that still depend on it.

This TWIF has 122 updated apps and 8 added, but many apps are still waiting in the queue. So, if your favorite app update is not yet live, we ask for a bit more patience.

Community News

@linsui tries to send an :emoji:

auth was updated to 2.0.41 and ente Photos was updated to 0.8.71. The ente team finally open sourced the server part so you can now touch the opening screen of auth for 7 times and enter your own self-hosted server URL. Photos is not yet ready, but should be coming soon. The apps descriptions are missing, but upstream is aware.

Delta Chat was updated to 1.44.0 bringing more of that polish this chat over e-mail app needs. Developers always have fun interesting blog posts and the latest one covers what’s new more extensively.

Material Files was updated to 1.7.0, but unfortunately it has some bugs, SFTP and SMB are broken currently, and the hot fix version is blocked by the Bookworm upgrade.

PipePipe was updated to 3.3.1 and will finally present the “Update checker” dialogue so users can decide if they want updates directly from the developer or if they want to use the F-Droid built and verified updates.

@Licaon_Kter does not have a tablet:

Quicksy was updated to 2.13.5+free and Conversations was updated to 2.13.5+free and the beta 2.14.0-beta.3+free. They include more fixes as usual, but two things are to be noted. Versions 2.13.x are the last ones that can be installed on Android 5, a system launched almost 10 years ago. If you’re still using it pretty please with sugar on top try to find a custom Android distro like LineageOS and update to the newest version available. If you feel that F-Droid provides apps that are better at security and privacy, there’s not much apps can do to protect you as a user if the underlying base system is vulnerable to 10 years of exploits.

The second note is that, besides needing Android 6 or later, 2.14.0 will introduce call integration, a feature that makes sense on calls enabled devices. In testing, tablet users, that usually lack such an integration, complained of crashes and those were fixed as much as found. So if you are a tablet user you might need to avoid updating to 2.14.0-beta.3+free and wait for the next beta or the final release, whatever comes first.

Tied to the two news items above, did you know that webxdc, “web apps shared in a chat”, a technology promoted by the Delta Chat developers, can now run in XMPP clients like the Conversations forks, Cheogram and monocles chat? More than 100 of them can already be tried out: https://webxdc.org/apps/

Removed Apps

1 apps were removed

The ParkenUlm developers have removed the app source code and asked the team to archive the app.

Newly Added Apps

8 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

115 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

United States files antitrust lawsuit against Apple

Posted on by Michael G
For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company’s astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives. It has deployed this playbook across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others. Apple’s conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone—or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, “Imagine buying a Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine … And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.” Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits. Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries–and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone. ↫ DoJ antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple The United States Department of Justice is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.