With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

                • Sorry, I may need to edit my original comment. I didn’t intend to imply that it’s bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not necessarily bad, to be fair. It’s just…meh. And honestly, I imagine that’s largely due to the fact that unlike the big name keyboard app makers, a lot of FOSS keyboards—Heliboard naturally being one of them—don’t track everything under the sun. Which is a good thing and something I like, make no mistake. The unfortunate downside of that is it’s also not quite as accurate, simply due to it not having as many data points.

                  This is not something I blame it for, but at the same time I was hoping perhaps another keyboard might have a prediction system different enough to be slightly better. Then again, I’m no expert on keyboard prediction systems so I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut in the first place. So apologies for that. :/

                  I feel autocorrect in general has gotten worse in the last decade or so. One problem I noticed, for example, that I’ve faced in other FOSS keyboards, not just in Heliboard, is that compared to ten years ago or so, there is a LOT more instances of autocorrect not catching absolute gibberish (like I get a couple letters off and it doesn’t catch it) or I’m one letter off of a very common word (like 1 key to the left or right) and it corrects it to something wildly different.

                  Maybe I’m just misremembering (after all, human memory is hardly ever reliable), but I feel it was a LOT better around the Jellybean era (for Android).

                  (Side note: this is all Android-specific; I have never owned any iOS device.)

  • Otter ( otter@lemmy.ca ) 
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    2 years ago

    Note for any new comments:

    It helps if you add an explanation of what it does, or link to read more. The name often isn’t descriptive enough, and people love to find new things to use.

  • Treeniks ( Treeniks@lemmy.ml ) 
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    2 years ago

    MuseScore had a big UI rework with MuseScore 4, with an excellent video about the behind the scenes by Tentacruel ().

    Although not sure if it caught people off guard as I’m not a user of it.

  • Wire’s new app just got pushed to fdroid. It was all but broken for a few years with no new updates on fdroid

    Update: Wire is probably the best encrypted messaging app. Its free, has no phone number requirement, has Foss apps on all platforms, messages sync on all platforms seamlessly, and all messages are encrypted (its not possible to send unencrypted).

    https://wire.com

    • yo_scottie_oh ( yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml ) 
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      2 years ago

      Interesting. Since the CEO of Telegram was arrested in France last month, I’ve read countless threads on c/privacy about which messaging app is best for privacy, and the two names that seem to come up the most are Signal and any Matrix client (e.g. Element); however, some commenters point out Signal’s phone number requirement and I forget what the other caveats are.

      I don’t recall reading about Wire in any of those threads, but at a glance it seems to check all the boxes (open source, always-on encryption, etc).

      Am I missing something? Any ideas why this app wouldn’t come up in such discussions?

      EDIT: Hmm, I just went back and re-read a thread from last week, and Wire is actually mentioned. Maybe I’ve just always mentally skipped over it until now.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun ( Adderbox76@lemmy.ca ) 
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    2 years ago

    I want to say the Natron compositing software, but I could be misremembering.

    I seem to recall it losing it’s only maintainer and therefore being updated or maintained anymore. I want to say this was back in 2018, but since it’s not a piece of kit I use often, I don’t really think about it enough for it to stick in my head. Anyway…point being. It posted a fairly large update in 2022 and has been doing updates since then.