elementary weekly is finally back – after an exciting and meaningful week for the elementary project. From now on I’m going to publish the unofficial weekly report every Saturday – and it is here to stay!

Freya beta 2 released – finally

At the beginning of this week something happed we were all waiting for – the release of the by the impatient community much more awaited second preview release of elementary OS 0.3 Freya. If you’re reading it here for the first time (what I really don’t expect, if you are a multi-channel follower of the project) and can’t wait any longer, you may want to head to the download links right away.

Many changes, and nearly 600 bugfixes were made and what you get is an widely optimized, refined and stabilized system, which is a huge step forward regarding the first prerelease. Application/development libraries are updated to the new GTK+ 3.14 version, a new calculator app comes out-of-the-box and even the cursor scheme got a refresh. You can read the whole list of changes and get the download links here.

And as this release is that different, it is strongly recommended that you do a clean install of the beta 2 when you’re running the first one. Technically you are already on the state of the second preview, when you’ve installed all updates, but preconfigured settings, script etc. aren’t corrected or improved by the updates when in doubt, so a clean install will work out better.

New elementary (beta) website and blog

A more or less long time ago announced and invented with concepts and mock-ups, the elementary web team now published a website under beta.elementary.io. Their blog also moved from the journal site to blog.elementary.io, which is based on their tumblr site. The new website is clearly not finished and lacks (mainly on the frontpage) some elementary style, at least in my opinion. But for example the new “Get Involved” page is already pretty beautiful and features the burn-down-chart overview of bug reports and -fixes for the upcoming release, which is going to be very satisfying for elementary-addicted people 😉 . Most likely with the final release of elementary OS 0.3, this website will take over the current one.

And just before I published this article, they officially moved to elementary.io. Visits via the .org domain are redirected, so you won’t have to change your bookmarks for now.

elementary Code of Conduct updated

The code of conduct guidelines for the elementary developers and community got expanded with two new sections; avoiding conflict, which says that everyone should avoid arguments and let others in an appropriate way know when they are rude, impolite or getting in conflict with other community rules and stepping down considerately, which regulates what to do when a developer or active team member wants to leave to elementary projects.

The elementary code of conduct is changing regularly and tries to ensure everyone in the community and team to be friendly and polite to everybody else and to restrict some unwanted behavior and content. In my opinion it is imported for everybody dealing with elementary to read the “rules” at least once and to follow them in the way they’re written.

Tip of the week – Use integrated tools to edit photos

The Pantheon Photos application comes with some basic, mostly enough, tools and options to edit and correct photos and pictures. You can rotate, flip and crop pictures, remove red eyes caused by the camera flash, adjust brightness, saturation, lights and more or use the automatic correction to improve your picture. You find these tools when you open a picture with the standard elementary application on the bottom left side. Enjoy it!

Check back next week for the latest news and tips!