Peek was an open-source animated GIF recorder that came in quite handy for capturing the contents of a screen.
Similarly, the 'Markets' app was an open-source app for Linux desktops and phones that allowed users to track stock market movements.
Sadly, both of these apps have been discontinued for their respective reasons.
Allow me to take you through more details.
What is happening?: In the case of Peek, the author 'Philipp Wolfer' announced back in January that the project has been declared as deprecated.
Seeing that the last release was made over 2 years ago, the reasons for discontinuing Peek are multifold.
One of those is that; Peek was started as a personal project for making short videos of partial UI elements and as an experiment.
It was never meant to be a do-it-all tool that gained such popularity among its users. It was intended to capture short screen captures in the GIF format; that's it.
The second reason is that Peek has faced many technical challenges regarding its UI.
You see, the behavior when running on Wayland was very erratic, which caused click-through issues with Peek.
Then there is the fact that Peek's UI was not playing nice with a few use cases. For example, when recording with GNOME's top bar or in full-screen.
That is not all; Peek utilized Gtk3, which is also deprecated now. It is unclear whether Gtk4 can even be an option or not.
You may be thinking, couldn't they have addressed the issues?
Well, technically, the developer could have, but:
But developing a completely different UI is not in my interest. The whole point of Peek was to provide the UI it has.
This experiment initially showed some success and found many people liking it. Thanks a lot for this support. But it has not stood the test of time and as of today this experiment is no longer successful.
That is the end of that saga, for now. Another developer seems to have started a cross-platform version of Peek (pypeek) written in Python and Qt, along with some enhanced features.
What about the Markets app?
On March 3, 2023, the project was archived on GitHub with a read-only flag and no formal announcement.
You can see it for yourself here.
I am not quite sure what happened to this app, but back when we covered the app, it offered valuable features and had support for both Linux desktops and mobiles.
Suggested Read 📖
Ankush Das
What now?: Well, currently, we hope someone forks these projects and takes over the reins while actively being able to maintain them.
Until then, you can try the following alternatives:
- To replace Peek, you can try out Gifine or pypeek.
- To replace Markets, you can try out Chart Geany.
💬 What would you replace these apps with? Would you wait for a fork to appear out of the blue?
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