NAVIGATION: David's Corner > Calmira

CALMIRA

THE MONTHLY DESKTOP

UPDATE: April 2009

Calmira is a replacement shell/program manager/file manager for Windows 3.1x. The original author (1996-98) was Li-Hsin Huang, but development since 1998 has been undertaken by Calmira Online.

Its purpose is to integrate Windows interfaces across the board. It provides Explorer-like features and other enhancements which brings Windows 3 closer to Windows 95.

Calmira is free and open-source; the program is written in Delphi 1.

Calmira Online is still at http://www.calmira.de

However, Calmira is effectively dead. There has been no substantial development for five or six years, and neither the Calmira mailing list or its host (eScribe) is online any more. When Calmira was started in 1996, Win95 was only a year old, Win 3.1 only four years old, and developing a program for low-spec. machines running 16-bit Windows made sense. It was (and is) a great program, but its time has come and gone.

Surprisingly, there are one or two developers still putting time into Calmira. Alex Sousa was developing a 32-bit version specifically for Windows NT 3.5 at his site until mid-2007, and Peter Protus is still developing the 16-bit version at Calmira Longhorn.

I have a collection of Calmira-related add-ons and utilities which I wrote between 1998 and 2000. They now have historical value only - Calmira Utilities page.

Calmira was a very useful, functional program, but it also gave Windows 3 the chance to shine visually. The Calmira Screenshot Gallery replaces the old CalTheme page and includes the previous monthly desktops which used to feature on this page.