Emerge Desktop is a replacement windows "shell" (the desktop environment normally provided by Windows Explorer) for Windows 2000 and above. In order to
replace Windows Explorer as a shell, it provides a system tray (the area that collects the icons collected at the lower right corner in Explorer), calledemergeTray. It will also provide access to the users programs (normally accessed with the windows "start" button) via a right-click on the desktop, viaemergeCore.
Emerge Desktop is implemented with MinGW which is an OpenSource implementation of the GNU C compiler and utilities. Up to this point, closed sourcecommercial projects have mainly been used (Microsoft Visual C++, Borland Delphi) to develop alternate shells as they use proprietary Microsoft API features. WithMicrosoft releasing more detailed information about these API calls, the MinGW win32api is now quite complete. Additionally, several web sites on the internet havestarted to include documentation and code that illustrate how to access and use these functions.
Emerge Desktop has an open API, which allows for applets to becoded with compilers other than MinGW if someone wishes to do so.
Emerge Desktop is written in C++, primarily developed with MinGW and is licensed as OpenSource(under the GPL). All the source is available in Subversion at Sourceforge. Emerge Desktop can be developed using :Blocks, an IDE for MinGW.
From a design point ofview, Emerge Desktop applets are capable of being run as both standalone as well as being integrated. In order for Emerge Desktop applets to communicate with eachother, emergeCore must be running. Without emergeCore, each applet will run independently (if, for example, you wish to use them in conjunction with anotherdesktop shell).
Size: 2.79MB
Release Date: 2010-08-30
OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7
Freeware
http://www.fileserve.com/file/PWUTkyX
