Our 2016 in Review
2016 has gone by in a flash! So in a similar style, we’d like to give a quick rundown of some of the things our team accomplished this year, complete with links to all the original articles!
SCaLE 14x
We kicked off the year with a trip to the Southern California Linux Expo where we spent four days showing off the Loki alpha and talking to folks about elementary OS. Cassidy also had the opportunity to present his talk “What Is UX?”. It went by in a blur, but we were happy to meet new people, connect with some people we’d only met online so far, and answer tons of questions.
Our Website
This year saw a ton of changes to our website (and web team!), starting in April when we hired the very talented Blake Kostner. We’ve added several new pages to our website over the year including our Brand, Open Source, and Team pages. It’s also no secret that we were very excited to release the new version of our Store in August! Worth mentioning are the major changes that we’ve made to the Get Involved and Developer pages. In October we blogged about major under-the-hood changes to our web infrastructure including the move to full HTTPS across all of our web servers. Finally, in November we were proud to be the new hosts of Valadoc.org: the best source for Vala documentation on the web.
Snappy
We first dipped our toes into Snappy back in July when we attended the Snappy Sprint in Heidelberg, Germany. We were able to spend time with developers from across the Linux world, exploring concepts and learning more about the new containerized world of Snap packages. We connected with old friends and made new ones too. In October, we announced our membership in the Snap Format ToB, represented by Cody. In November, he had the pleasure of attending the next Snappy Sprint in Den Haag, Netherlands where the board championed AppStream and sought to make Snaps better available for more distributions.
Loki & Its Apps
In February, we followed up the sad news of Yorba’s disappearing with the news that we would be forking Geary and continuing its development as Pantheon Mail. We’re happy to say that since that time we’ve cleaned out thousands of lines of old code, fixed numerous issues, created an entirely new native message viewer with RTL language support, added initial online accounts integration support, and more!
In June, we announced the first public beta of Loki, representing work that we’d done since April of 2015. We highlighted some of the huge changes we had made such as the move away from Ayatana indicators and the under-the-hood changes that came with an updated software stack. We followed that up in July with a second beta addressing major issues that had been found in the previous month of testing. Finally in September, we joined Chris Fisher in a special live broadcast to make the public release of elementary OS 0.4: Loki. In the months following we’ve continued to push out updates to Loki including bug fixes, new features, and internationalization updates.
Onward!
It’s been a busy and exciting year filled with new friends, plenty of challenges, and tons of little win moments. It’s fun to look back and see our team evolving and learning and making strides towards our vision of a future powered by Open Source software. Before we sign off for the last time in 2016, we have one major New Year’s resolution to make: blogging way more. When writing this post, it become obvious that we dropped the ball on communication last year. So in 2017 we promise to make more noise about what we’re doing and what we’ve done. Look forward to way more posts! We’ll see you all on the other side.
Happy New Year!
We’d like to say thanks again to our supporters on Bountysource and Patreon, those who’ve purchased a copy of elementary OS or merch from our store. Every contribution helps make all of this possible, and we wouldn’t be here without you! If you’d like to help improve elementary OS, don’t hesitate to Get Involved!
