If you are as old as me you will remember the Cairo project, an attempt to create an object based layer on top of what was then Windows NT (remember that?). I was lucky enough to see some of the prototype Cairo builds but they never came to fruition. The best bit was the OFS (Object File System) which was the pre-cursor to WinFS (which also died), but the flashy bit was the UI which eventually was toned down in Windows 2000.
Well now some crazy guys are re-creating Cairo, or at least the shell bits, initially for Vista but also later for XP (Hooray). I’m not entirely sure what they will achieve with this, but almost anything is better than the current Vista shell. So we’ll have to wait and see, but it looks pretty.
