Shotwell gets a new developer

If you are a Linux user and have a large photo collection then you are probably familiar with Shotwell.

Shotwell can:

* import photos from folders or from your digital camera or phone
* automatically group photos taken at the same time, use tags and ratings to organize your phot0 collection.
* rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.
* publish and share photos

Because of the lack of development in Shotwell, Yorba the creator of Shotwell has handed over development to the Elementary OS team.

"I've been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell for a while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a new maintainer. Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos, and Yorba just doesn't have the resources anymore to maintain Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary. So that pretty much leaves us or an unknown to take up the mantel"

"Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part of our community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to bring it up to date and make it into a really great app". -Daniel Foré, Elementary OS project leader.

In case you are unfamiliar with Elementary OS, it's an Ubuntu based distro with a Mac OS X feel.

I think this is great. Instead of letting Shotwell die like many other apps have done when they have no development resources, Yorba is passing it on to a community that will spend the time and talent to keep it a very useful application.

Pear Os is no more, for now

 We bid adieu to an excellent operating system. Pear Os "closed it's doors" this week, stating it was bought out by a party that wants to remain anonymous.

"Pear OS is no longer available for download. Its future is now in hands of a company who wants to remain anonymous for the moment. The concept has pleased them it and now wants to continue and improve the system for their own products. I can not give a name but it is a very large company well known ... I want to thank all users, moderators and other developers who have made Pear OS it is today, that without this adventure would not have been possible. I'm going in another direction. Pear Cloud users must recover their files on Pear Cloud servers. In 10 days, the files will be deleted and the server will be offline. Another big thank you to all and I hope to return to the scene of open source very quickly. Cordially. David" -http://pearlinux.org/

Sad to see it go, they had a decent following because of the OS's Mac OS X feel and excellent collection of apps that came "out of the box".

Here is a screenshot of what the OS looks like:

Good bye, beautiful friend.