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

Discuss in our forums >>

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

Discuss in our forum >>

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

Discuss in our forum>>

-The Cairo Team

A larger Cairo update will come later following a team meeting.

Best,

Cairo Team

I know what you all must be thinking: will we ever see Cairo? Is Cairo worth the wait? Whole-heartily: YES! Vaporware we are not. The whole team is disappointed that we needed to pull an Apple and delay what we know you are all waiting patiently for,  but we echo the sentiments of many forum members who would rather have a stable, feature rich milestone instead of, well, the opposite.

I know many of you are also confused by our lack of information disclosure, but that’s how we must roll until we can realistically divulge information without the threat of imitators. As always, we appreciate your support and welcome any suggestions to help make the time go by faster.  (Perhaps a forum contest and the winner gets a custom title?) Just throwing that out there.

-Best,

The Cairo Team

For reference, we are requiring a Windows Vista environment and a confirmation email within 5 days to preserve your spot.

Thanks,

Cairo Team

-The Cairo Team

Discuss in our forum>> 

Milestone Information

We are beginning the final preparations for the M1 release. Selected testers will be receiving a confirmation email soon and must reply within 5 days with the appropriate information or they will be replaced.

Copyrights

We are working on protecting our intellectual property, both now and in the future. Enough said.

The Cairo Website

Once the first Milestone is out, we will begin revitalizing the website. What does this mean? Admittedly, we get a little lazy at times, so to commemorate our first of many achievements, we will be including an FAQ page, updating our features page, and performing visual tweaks on the homepage and throughout the site.

**This includes the addition of our donator’s only forum and milestone forum.**

Secrets are fun…

Discuss in our forum>>

-The Cairo Team

So far we have had over 1000 individuals register and expect many more in the coming days. We will be selecting about 200 testers and will send out email confirmations to selected applicants.

Thank you for your support.

-Cairo Development Team