April showers bring May flowers, and they also bring a lot of exciting releases. Here are a few projects that made an impression in the last month!

Hyper 2.0

Hyper is an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based terminal emulator that’s built with Electron. The latest release, Hyper 2, has a new rendering engine (built on xterm.js 3.0) which allows it to better handle streaming output. Other Hyper 2 improvements include a command-line installer for plugins, clickable hyperlinks, and more. See the release announcement for details.

Did you know: Hyper supports a big collection of plugins and themes. Ever wish your terminal was a bit more like BB-8 in a galaxy far, far away? Or maybe you’d rather catch a command line Bulbasaur or Pikachu? Find these and other themes in the new Hyper store.

NetHack 3.6.1

NetHack is a role-playing, terminal-based game packed with procedurally-generated dungeons, monsters, and magic. If that piques your interest, then you might be feeling the call of the Amulet of Yendor. Originally released in 1987 and in ongoing development ever since, the game is celebrating its version 3.6.1 release. The release notes are technically spoilers, so consider yourself warned before you read them.

Did you know: NetHack is one of many roguelike games that trace their gameplay roots back to the 1980 video game, Rogue. We hosted the second annual Roguelike Celebration at GitHub HQ last October. All of the talks were recorded and included a live speedrun of NetHack by Mikko Joula (aka Adeon), who holds the record for fastest real-time ascension.

Flask 1.0

Flask is a small and flexible web framework for Python. Flask’s API has been stable for some time and version 1.0 brings exciting changes. Flask 1.0 improves the flexibility of the command-line interface, fixes a security issue with JSON encodings, adds support for loading environment variables from files, and more. See the announcement for a complete run down.

Did you know: Flask started out as an April Fool’s joke. (Not kidding.)

Nerd Fonts 2.0

Nerd Fonts brings together a bunch of icon sets—like Font Awesome, Devicons, and Material Design Icons—into one collection, and provides the tools to let you make your own. The latest release, version 2.0, adds new documentation translations and several new fonts, including OpenDyslexic and Noto. Read the release notes for details.

Did you know: There are thousands of icons in Nerd Fonts. (How many do you recognize?)

Monica 2.0

Monica is a tool to help people strengthen their relationships by helping them with things like remembering birthdays, gift ideas, and names of relations. Monica 2.0 adds better support for more real-world relationships (like aunts and nieces), options for hiding unwanted features, support for right-to-left languages, and more. See the release announcement for more information.

React Styleguidist 7.0

React Styleguidist is a tool that helps your team document React components based on your own code and Markdown-formatted comments. Version 7 adds Webpack 4 support, fixes bugs, and makes Node.js 6 the lowest supported version, among other changes.

Did you know: Lots of people are sharing their React Styleguidist demos in this GitHub issue.

Hackathon Starter 5.0

The appropriately named Hackathon Starter is a boilerplate for getting up and running with a Node.js and Express application. It cuts through the process of choosing a language, web framework, and CSS framework; then, it gives you a bunch of examples for authentication and APIs to get hacking quickly. Hackathon Starter 5 upgrades to Node.js 8, switches to ES6 in lots more places, and fixes bugs in API examples. To see more of what’s changed in this release, take a look at the release notes.

Playcanvas 1.0

PlayCanvas is a visual development platform for building games and interactive web content. Both the tools and the web apps you build are powered by HTML5. The platform is entirely web hosted; you can access your work from any device that runs one of the supported web browsers. See the release announcement for more details.

Did you know: Mozilla used PlayCanvas to create the interactive WebGL2 After the Flood demo, allowing viewers to take a walk through the fantastical environment of water, glass, and steel running entirely in the browser.

Chainer 4.0

Chainer is neural networks framework for Python and they’ve recently reached version 4.0. Version 4 improves performance with support for iDeep acceleration on Intel CPUs, adds better techniques for lower precision training, and reorganizes the documentation. Check out the release announcement for the project and its hardware acceleration companion, CuPy.

Handsontable 2.0

Handsontable is a JavaScript component for spreadsheets that can plug into popular frameworks like Angular and Vue. It’s been six years since the last time Handsontable had a major-version release! In version 2.0, they’re adopting Semantic Versioning to make way for combining their Pro and Community Edition codebases. Plus they’ve made a lot of bug fixes. See the release announcement for a full list of changes.

Did you know: Handsontable—or more accurately, their users—make a great argument for the adoption of open source tools. Check out these interesting case studies from teams that are using Handsontable.

Redux 4.0

Redux is a state container for JavaScript that helps developers write predictable, testable applications in different environments. Redux’s 4.0 release introduces a bunch of under-the-hood improvements, tons of documentation updates, and new bindings for TypeScript 2. Scope out the release notes for details.

Honorable mentions

It’s hard to cherry-pick from all the amazing releases each month, but there’s no way open-source giants are flying under our radar. The new MySQL 8 brings a broad range of changes. Node.js 10 unveils binary interface stability, modernized cryptography, and much more, while npm coordinated their npm 6 release to deliver security and performance improvements. Check them out!

These are just a handful of releases that were shipped last month—keep them coming! If you’ve got a release that should be on our radar, send us a note.

Over 600,000 repositories received statuses in January 2018 alone—more than a 50 percent increase from last year—and now statuses will provide you with more information than ever. Today we’re introducing the public beta release of the Checks API, a better way to get feedback from integrations on your code. The Checks API allows you to build sophisticated tools for continuous integration (CI), linting, and acceptance testing on GitHub. This new functionality currently works with the GitHub REST API, with GraphQL support coming soon.

What’s new

Instead of pass/fail build statuses, your integrations can now report richer results, annotate code with detailed information, and kick off reruns—all within the GitHub user interface.

Build outputs are now accessible with the new “Checks” tab on pull requests. Inline annotations are simple to find, too. They’ll appear right alongside the relevant code in the pull request, so you can identify and address failing checks even faster.

Learn more about the Checks API

Over the last several weeks, we’ve worked closely with partners on fine-tuning the Checks experience—and we’re excited to share several apps already using the API.

Microsoft Visual Studio App Center and Outlook integration

Microsoft maintains hundreds of open source projects on GitHub, including Visual Studio Code, which had the most community participants among any project last year, and TypeScript, one of the fastest growing languages in 2017. Now we’re partnering with Microsoft to integrate Azure’s DevOps services with GitHub, starting with Azure’s Mobile CI service. GitHub will detect mobile projects and suggest developers set up mobile CI using any one of our providers, including App Center.

With App Center installed, you can automate builds on every commit, test apps on real devices in the cloud, and monitor usage with crash and analytics data. And because the App Center integration uses the Checks API, mobile developers will be able to see the results directly within GitHub’s interface.

To provide you with simple, streamlined experiences for tools you already use, we’re also integrating GitHub with Microsoft Outlook using Adaptive Cards. Over the next several weeks, Outlook users will be able to comment on issues from their inbox—and soon after, be able to merge pull requests, too.

Travis CI integration

As a leading provider of hosted CI, Travis CI has been helping build and test open source and private projects for more than seven years. Travis CI recently adopted GitHub Apps and now includes Checks as a way for your team to share the results of your project’s branch and pull request builds. View your build’s stages, jobs, and results, including the config associated with them to get a complete picture of the health of your projects directly from GitHub. You can also rerun builds from within the GitHub Checks UI.

Learn more about Travis CI integration with the Checks API

CircleCI integration

Speed up your test and development cycle without extra maintenance. Follow your GitHub project from CircleCI, and set up your first build in no time thanks to CircleCI’s automatically generated build and test steps and simple extensibility. Checks API compatibility with CircleCI is on the way.

Today’s announcement is just the start. We’ll continue shipping new ways for you to make the most of GitHub and build useful, powerful tools that work seamlessly with our platform. With easy access to an open ecosystem of applications, you can create fast and flexible workflows that help you focus on what matters most.

Today we’re introducing the GitHub Changelog–a chronological list of user-facing changes, large and small, made to the GitHub platform.

We regularly ship incremental improvements to make your GitHub experience even better. The changelog will supplement major release announcements on the GitHub Blog, encompassing smaller ships and enhancements you might not hear about otherwise. These include new features, security updates, deprecations, improvements, and more. Each entry will provide a short description of changes and direct you to additional resources, like documentation or blog posts.

Subscribe to the changelog or follow the official GitHub Changelog Twitter account to hear about updates as they happen.

As part of our work to open source policies for other companies to adapt and use, and in accordance with the UK Modern Slavery Act, we’ve included our Statement Against Modern Slavery and Child Labor in the latest round of updates to our Site Policy repository.

While modern slavery (slavery, forced or compulsory labor, trafficking, servitude, and workers who are imprisoned, indentured, or bonded) and child labor are not typically associated with software, businesses in all industries are increasingly recognizing that there are possibilities for these abuses to occur in their own labor force or through their sourcing practices.

We have no reason to believe modern slavery or child labor is occurring in our business or supply chain, and we have outlined our policies and due diligence processes to help ensure it won’t happen in the future. Given the abhorrent nature of modern slavery and child labor, prohibiting these atrocities in our business and supply chain is a logical and important commitment for GitHub to make.

While publishing a statement is a requirement for certain businesses under UK law, our statement goes beyond the requirements of that law by holding our suppliers to our statement too. Our statement also highlights our partnership with the FairHotel Program, through which we encourage GitHub employees to choose hotels where workers are paid fair wages, receive adequate benefits, and have a voice on the job. To ensure our commitment to preventing modern slavery and child labor in our business and supply chain, we’ll publish a new statement annually, building on our previous statements.

GitHub is excited to participate in this year’s RightsCon on May 16-18, where we will discuss this statement and other human rights-oriented aspects of our work. Look for us there!

We announced the public beta of the open source, Electron-built version of GitHub Desktop a year ago, giving the GitHub community a unified GitHub experience for macOS and Windows. With every release, including the version 1.0 in September 2017, we’ve seen more people using GitHub Desktop to improve their workflows. Less than six months after 1.0 was released, more Desktop users were using the Electron-based version than both the classic versions for Mac and Windows combined.

Since its initial release, we’ve added more features to GitHub Desktop, including support for additional external editors, syntax highlighting support for additional languages, support for adding co-authors to commits, and the ability to view and checkout pull requests from collaborators or forks. Many of these new features were contributions from the open source community.

Starting today, if you’re still using the classic app, you’ll see in-app notifications suggesting an upgrade to the new GitHub Desktop with information on what’s changed. If you are still using GitHub for Mac or GitHub for Windows, or if you’ve never used our desktop apps, try out the new GitHub Desktop.