Facebook announced yesterday that it is closing the Parse service, and it will be fully retired on Jan. 28, 2017.

Parse is Facebook’s mobile development platform, but the company will be focusing its resources elsewhere, according to the Parse blog. To help with this transition, Parse is releasing a database migration tool that lets developers migrate data from a Parse app to any MongoDB database. During this migration, the Parse API will continue to operate as usual based on the new database, so this can happen without downtime.

Next, Parse is releasing Parse Server into open source, letting developers run most of the Parse API from a Node.js server. Once the data is in the database, the Parse Server lets developers keep the application running without major changes in the client-side code. The migration guide can be found here.

TypeScript 1.8 beta released
Microsoft is announcing a beta version of its superset JavaScript programming language TypeScript. The beta for version 1.8 is now available for npm, NuGet, and Visual Studio 2015 on GitHub. The latest version of the programming language includes improved JavaScript compilation, expanded JSX support, an official TypeScript NuGet package, and ChakraCore.

In addition, it features F-bounded polymorphism, string literal types, control flow analysis, the ability to report errors for fall-through cases, support for stateless function components, and improved type interface.

A full list of new features is available here.

Tails hits version 2.0
Tails, a live operating system, has reached version 2.0. The first version of Tails was based on GNOME Shell, with changes in the desktop environment, and Debian 8, which upgrades most software included within.

Changes include GNOME Shell in its Classic mode. Accessibility and non-Latin input sources are also better integrated with this release. Security issues that affected Tails 1.8.2 have also been fixed.

For this version, Tails has a manual upgrade instructions list that it suggested users follow.