Cairo Development Team
June 26, 2008
To The Cairo Community,
The Cairo Desktop Environment aims to deliver unprecedented usability and productivity enhancements for the Microsoft Windows operating system. With revolutionary features, including our dynamic desktop and file browser, Cairo will truly bring users a more productive user experience, coupled with a beautiful user-interface.
In April 2008 the Cairo Team announced the beginning of a code reset following the unfortunate loss of over 8 months of work; a true lesson learned. With a new development life-cycle, subversion software, and determined team, Cairo is ready to revolutionize the traditional desktop.
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The following are the winners of the Cairo Design Faceoff. They were chosen after careful consideration for simplicity and creativity.
First: Download
This wallpaper will be the official Milestone 1 wallpaper. Igiietc will also receive access to the private forum and a custom forum title.
Last week the Cairo Team introduced our Design Faceoff Contest. Thus far, we have had some great submissions. It will certainly be hard to decide a winner. Don’t forget, if you want to submit a wallpaper for the competition, the deadline is June 2.
As for Cairo, development is proceeding as planned and as far as we can tell, is still on track for a tentative Milestone 1 release of June 29. I would like to publicly thank our developers, Dustin Hanson, David Hart, and Nic Newman for their dedication and hard work thus far. They are truly doing a wonderful job and deserve a lot of praise for their efforts. I would also like to thank Sam Johnson, another team member who worked tediously with me to get our new site design up and running.
I will end this post with a fun fact: If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
Best wishes,
The Cairo Team
As you all know, we have our Milestone 1 tentatively scheduled for June 29, 2008. Aside from being a great opportunity to get our community involved and to improve Cairo’s overall quality, we thought it would be nice to give those who aren’t part of our private alpha a chance to join in as well. As a result, we will be running a contest from now until June 2 to reward the best designers in our community.
An important part of our lives and certainly an important part of the Cairo desktop environment, design is increasingly becoming an major point of significance in the technological world. So Cairo community, this is your chance!
Send us your best wallpaper representing a few of Cairo’s core values: simplicity and beauty. The first prize winner will be entered in our upcoming milestone, get access to our private forum, and have their design become the official Cairo wallpaper for the Milestone. The runner up will have their wallpaper added to our downloads section as a featured item and get a custom forum title. Third place will receive a custom forum title.
The rules of the contest are as follows:
(a) You may only submit 2 wallpapers during the 4-week contest period.
(b) Offensive or disturbing wallpapers are not allowed.
(c) Wallpapers must be submitted in both standard and widescreen aspect ratios and must have a minimum resolution of 1600px x 1200px.
(d) Be creative and original!
The winners will be announced Tuesday, June 2. Good luck and happy designing!
-The Cairo Team
As some of you may be aware from our last update, we were unfortunately graced by the loss of our entire code-base, leaving us with only shattered dreams and fond memories. While many of you stuck by us, some of you were understandably critical and upset. Nevertheless, we have regrouped and are back swinging.
Development on the new Cairo code-base has begun and will speed along for our first private milestone (originally intended for February 2008) tentatively slated for June 29, 2008. As development progresses, we will post news updates with real screenshots of Cairo. That’s right boys and girls, you will see the real deal as it develops.
As part of our work towards June 29, our goal is to conduct private milestones within the team as each piece of Cairo is tested for stability, performance, and feature usability. While the alpha will not be feature complete, it will represent a solid representation of what users can expect once Cairo is released. Beyond our first milestone will be an eventual public beta, bug report service, and an eventual SDK for the creation of plugins.
As always, we appreciate your dedication and support and look forward to sharing our journey with you towards June 29.
Best,
The Cairo Team
Many people have been wondering what’s been up with us lately, with no word on progress for the last month. We are sorry to say that our lack up updates have been due to a lack of actual progress.
Let me explain:
Coding of Cairo started last August, by one single developer. Over time, we have hired and lost developers that haven’t contributed to the building of Cairo. This one developer had been quite devoted on the creation of the Milestone 1 build and promised us that we would be able to release it in February. Over time, we have had a lapse of communication with him for several weeks at a time. After two warnings, we have decided to release him from the team and to pass the Cairo development on to our newly joined members.
However, he still has all of the code which has the desktop nearly done, as well as the menubar and explorer started and partially populated with features.
We have been attempting to contact him to get the source code for the parts of Cairo that have been developed, but we still haven’t heard anything, a week later. If we don’t get this source code, we will have to consider that code abandonware and re-start coding Cairo from scratch. This is why we have been pushing that we need developers a bit more lately.
The Cairo Team is very sorry to have to say this, but we cannot bring ourselves to hide what has been going on from our fans. However, we do still expect (and are extremely devoted) to deliver Cairo as promised. In hindsight, should we need to rebuild Cairo, we will come back stronger and better prepared than before. We ask for your continued support through this difficult time and appreciate your understanding.
Best,
-The Cairo Team
