The Monkeys Have Hit The Button (again)

Three cheers for the Cairo Shell development team! With less than six days from the second official alpha, Cairo will take a stab at the infamous Vista and the greatly anticipated Windows 7 interface. When this shell replacement reaches even its beta stage, there will be no need to ever see "explorer.exe" hogging up system resource ever again.

But when was this miracle of a program going to be made public? No one knows. The development team does not want to set any dates or deadline, even rough estimates. This caution makes sense. A shell program that wants to replace Explorer, Luna (yes, they might port it to XP), and Aero is not written over night. The Cairo team does not want to have a reputation like that of Windows, Apple, and every other software company that has late releases and buggy code. As a computer science student, I know that software never completely meets the deadline and Vista is a crashing example of software that was forced out too quickly.

Cairo is not the first team trying to make Windows bearable. There are other projects such as GeoShell (http://www.geoshell.org/) and Sharp Enviro (http://www.sharpe-shell.org/) that do basically the same thing. Although, the exciting attribute about Cairo is that Cairo is by far the best looking shell replacement out there!