Classic Shell is no longer actively developed

[clifford_cooley]

Posted by Ivo the site admin and developer of Classic Shell.

http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8147

Sad news, everyone.

After months of deliberation, I have decided to stop the development of Classic Shell.

It was a great adventure for me that lasted 8 fun and exciting years. It started back in 2009 as a simple weekend project and over time grew to be a hugely popular software brand with many millions of downloads. It was in large part due to all of you, the active Classic Shell community, that reported issues, suggested features, provided translations, developed new skins and participated in forum discussions. My thanks go to you for your continued support and encouragement.

And of course, special thanks to Gaurav Kale, who stuck with me from the early days to the end. His passion for all things Windows was instrumental to the Classic Shell success.

There were few factors that led to my decision:
1) Lack of free time. I have other hobbies that demand my time, some related to software and some not. It requires a lot of effort to add new major features to Classic Shell and keep it relevant. Even keeping it running on newer version of Windows is a lot of work. That leads me to point #2

2) Windows 10 is being updated way too frequently (twice a year) and each new version changes something that breaks Classic Shell. And

3) Each new version of Windows moves further away from the classic Win32 programming model, which allowed room for a lot of tinkering. The new ways things are done make it very difficult to achieve the same customizations

So, moving forward, I am making the latest version of Classic Shell open-source and adding it back to SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/), where it all began. I encourage other people to fork it and go with it.
I will keep the MediaFire download mirror for another 6 months. The forum on http://www.classicshell.net/forum/ will stay open until the end of 2018, however I will not frequently participate in the discussions.

Update: The source code can be also found on GitHub here: https://github.com/coddec/Classic-Shell

 

[Ian]

That's a shame, but great to see that it is being released on SourceForce/GitHub so that others can keep it alive if they wish - a good decision.

I imagine that the amount of work required to keep up to date with all of the recent changes must have been substantial. Really good that it was kept going for this long, for those that wanted the old look back.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Sad though as it might keep me from installing new builds as quickly. And if it ends here, I may never move forward. That's just how badly I hate those squares.