[BlindMath] Announcing BraileBlaster 3.0.1

[Michael Whapples]

Firstly thank you David for reposting this here. Some additional notes I 
will say without my APH hat and on my own behalf.


In that message I noted APH has no BrailleBlaster build for the Mac for 
that release. Well privately I can offer something to Mac and other 
users, BrailleBlaster-NG a community fork of BrailleBlaster which can be 
found at https://brailleblaster-ng.app and source in GitHub at 
https://github.com/mwhapples/BrailleBlaster-NG.


Admittedly BrailleBlaster and BrailleBlaster-NG are very similar at the 
moment and I will make effort to try and keep it that the two are 
compatible, however it won't be an unbreakable goal should it not be in 
the best interest of the project and users.


Some of the current differences:

* Mac builds, for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. Like BrailleBlaster 
there are also Windows X86-64 and Linux AARCH64 and X86_64 builds.

* Releases are fully under my control and I try and make them quickly 
and frequently. As an example the math related bug which affected 
BrailleBlaster 3.0.0 also affected BrailleBlaster-NG, however I had a 
fix in BrailleBlaster-NG and released late on Monday evening, APH did 
not officially have this fix out until this Saturday.

* Should you want both APH's BrailleBlaster and my BrailleBlaster-NG, 
you can install both alongside each other without issue.

* In making the fork I want the attention to be on providing what the 
community wants and needs, APH has its own priorities (eg. professional 
transcription for materials within the USA).


The last point does bring me to a call I do have, as a community project 
I am doing BrailleBlaster-NG as a personal side project in my own time. 
Community contributions would certainly be welcome and it can be code 
but it can also be documentation, website or even thorough testing and 
issue creation, may be even just helping out answering other user 
questions. At the moment I am suggesting having the discussions section 
of the GitHub repository as the place for community discussions on 
BrailleBlaster-NG, in time I probably will broaden that to other places 
as well.


Michael Whapples

On 06/04/2025 17:28, David Andrews via BlindMath wrote:
>
>>
>> From: aphbrailleblaster-announce-bounce at freelists.org 
>> <aphbrailleblaster-announce-bounce at freelists.org> On Behalf Of 
>> Michael Whapples
>>
>>
>>
>> On behalf of APH I am pleased to announce the release of 
>> BrailleBlaster 3.0.1. This release deals with the issues relating to 
>> math causing errors in the previous version which lead to that 
>> release being withdrawn. This release can be obtained at 
>> <https://brailleblaster.org/download.php>the BrailleBlaster website. 
>> Unfortunately for Mac users, APH still has no Mac build of 
>> BrailleBlaster 3.0.1, for now you will need to continue using 
>> BrailleBlaster 2.1.9, find an alternative build of BrailleBlaster or 
>> build from source.
>>
>>
>>
>> As this release is only about fixing the math issue, there are no 
>> further release notes this time.
>>
>>
>>
>> Michael Whapples
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