Software: Abricotine, Curl, LibreOffice and Proprietary Traps
Free/Libre:
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Excellent Utilities: Abricotine – open source Markdown editor
This is a new series of reviews highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’re covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. For this article, we’ll put Abricotine under the spotlight.
Abricotine is an open source, cross-platform Markdown editor built for the desktop with inline preview functionality. Let’s recap about Markdown.
Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write.
Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *.
Markdown has a much more basic syntax than HTML, leaving aside things like opening and closing tags, and instead uses punctuation and characters that all users will already use in daily writing. The punctuation characters have been carefully chosen to resemble what they mean. The intention is to ensure that the syntax does not stop the flow of writing, allowing the author to focus on content, rather than how it looks. In this way, Markdown shares a common bond with LaTeX, a document preparation system for high quality typesetting, which also encourages authors not to focus too much on the appearance, but to concentrate on the right content.
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curl 7.65.1 patched up and ready to go
We worked hard on fixing bugs in the weeks before we shipped curl 7.65.0. We really did. Yet, several annoying glitches managed to creep in, remain unnoticed and cause problems to users when they first eagerly tried out the new release. Those were glitches that none in the development team had experienced or discovered but only took a few hours for users to detect and report.
The initial bad sign was that it didn’t even take a full hour from the release announcement until the first bug on 7.65.0 was reported. And it didn’t stop with that issue. We obviously had a whole handful of small bugs that caused friction to users who just wanted to get the latest curl to play with. The bugs were significant and notable enough that I quickly decided we should patch them up and release an update that has them fixed: 7.65.1. So here it is!
This patch release even got delayed. Just the day before the release we started seeing weird crashes in one of the CI builds on macOS and they still remained on the morning of the release. That made me take the unusual call to postpone the release until we better understood what was going on. That’s the reason why this comes 14 days after 7.65.0 instead of a mere 7 days.
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Some Of The Best Windows Emulators For Linux
Let’s look into the list of some of the useful and best Windows emulators for Linux based operating systems.
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LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents
The Document Foundation has released the first beta of LibreOffice 6.3, with new features including a redaction tool and a Fourier Analysis spreadsheet function.
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice in 2010, which is when The Document Foundation was formed, including a team of OpenOffice contributors. OpenOffice has also continued and is now Apache OpenOffice. The default format of both suites is OpenDocument, an ISO standard.
Version 6.3 is planned for full release in mid August. There are new features of which the most notable is the built-in redaction tool. Existing proprietary tools do not support open document formats, the release notes explained.
The new tool works by converting the target document to a LibreOffice drawing. You then blank out parts of the document by placing shapes over the offending words. Finally, the redaction tool offers a "Redacted Export" option, which creates a PDF in which the document becomes a bitmap with no selectable text.
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QA Report: May 2019
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Month of LibreOffice, May 2019: The winners!
Proprietary:
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Apple will soon kill off iTunes and, with it, an entire era of music history
iTunes—a program for managing your media library, listening to songs, and buying new content—played a key part in the digital revolution of the 2000s after it first launched in 2001. Its impact started with music. iTunes was partly credited with slowing the severe bleeding to piracy the recording industry faced amid the popularity of the MP3 boom on peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like Napster. And the program was also the home base for the iPod, one of the first of many products CEO Steve Jobs oversaw when steering the company back to success after he returned to his leadership position in 1998.
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Google Chrome 75 Released with Minor Improvements And 42 Security Fixes
Google Chrome team has released Chrome 75 (75.0.3770.80) on June 4, 2019.
Chrome 75 stable channel was released for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
This release contains a number of fixes (42 Security Fixes) and few minor improvements.
There’s an experimental reader mode available via the chrome://flags page.
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Google Chrome 75 released with secret Reader Mode
Google has released today version 75 of its Chrome browser, available for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Google Chrome 75 Released with Minor Improvements
Google Chrome 75 Released with Minor Improvements & Security Fixes