હાય મિત્રો!

I hope you're well and safe.

This is a quick email to let you know what's going on here, under the heat of the French summer. Fortunately, I've moved in the Alps, and the altitude helps keep the temperature a bit more bearable than in plains.

RxAPI is the RxLab Application Programing interface. It's a small server we use to check if updates are available for your tools, get some statistics, and display information on the RxLaboratory website.

We've finally open sourced this tool, and made it available under our usual GNU General public license. This can be interesting in two cases for you:

1- If you're developing and distributing your own (free) tools, you can easily adapt it to your own needs.

2- If you're a simple user, you can access all the open data and statistics we have.

Details here, the source code is available on Github, and it's documented here: rxapi.rxlab.io

To view our stats, we've built this page: rxlaboratory.org/open-data/ where you'll see 25% of you are using a Mac, the others are on Windows, for example. This is the kind of data collected by the server when a tool connects to it to check if an update is available. This is completely anonymous and untraceable, the server only gets the OS and its version, the name of the tool and its version, the host application (if any). All the data is open and you can get it from the RxAPI.

One last detail, this RxAPI is also used to serve random quotes displayed on our website. If you'd like to use them too, go to: api.rxlab.io/quote !

Don't hesitate to suggest quotes to add!

The development of Duik Ángela is nearly finished, we just have a few tweaks to add. I'm now writing the doc! It's a big work, but it's going well. I'm updating the public page regularly, it's on duik.rxlab.guide.

The book will be published a bit after I've finished writing the doc, and then the official video course will follow shortly after that! We'll give a discount to all patrons here on Patreon and members of the RxLab Development fund.

DuBlast, an add-on to quickly render playblasts in Blender, got a new update recently, which fixes some issues for the latest versions of Blender, and which is now able to automatically check if a new version is available.

Our script to group layers in After Effects was also updated recently, to include new translations (German and Russian), helping more people everywhere in the world to work more easily with free tools, because it's important to do what we can to let people express themselves through video and animation.

Whether you're a patron from Patreon or a Member of RxLab, don't hesitate to show you're supporting us, and call for people to do the same, using the new small badge we've designed for example.

Just save it and include it on your website or social media, with a link to membership.rxlab.io
It's always useful to post something from time to time to explain to and remind your fellow animators that free software needs support! (and that they'll get an early access to all RxLab tools, including Duik Ángela)

Thanks again for your support,
We wish you all to be safe, and have a happy summer or winter!

💜With love💜

Duduf & the RxLab. Team