Lots of news from the first few hours of the PDC. First off, in the first CTP of Vista, the sidebar has been revived. "The Sidebar will be populated with "gadgets" and will feature an open platform for developers to create their own mini-applications. Sidebar gadgets can be dragged onto the desktop, and interact with standard Windows applications." Also, "Microsoft Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Max is the codename for Microsoft's flagship application based on WinFX and Microsoft's new user experience." Images from the PDC here, and you can watch Bill Gates' keynote here. Also, MS released beta 2 of Monad.

The company is launching a "community technology preview" program for Vista, offering interim updates of the operating system in between its official beta releases. Microsoft has increasingly been using such previews as a way to offer more frequent test builds to developers. The first CTP was released today at the PDC. Elsewhere, ActiveWin has obtained screenshots of this latest Vista pre-release.

After providing Blastwave many of its PPC-based Open Desktop Workstations to speed up the port of OpenSolaris to PPC, Genesi has announced to donate $50 to Blastwave for each ODW sold, in order to keep the Blastwave community from shutting down.

In this interview, Hans discusses his background and how he came to create Namesys and Reiserfs. He looks back at Reiser3, describing the advantages it had over other filesystems when it was released and its current state. He then explores the many improvements in Reiser4, describing the plugin architecture and its exciting potential for future semantic enhancements.

"PC-BSD version 0.8 is now available! A lot of effort went into improving this version, and many thanks is due to all the people who have tested and provided valuable feedback on our support forum. This version now adds the Online Update Manager, along with many other fixes and enhancements. For a complete list of changes, please refer to the changelog." Release notes are here, download locations here. The various documents disagree with one another on whether or not this is the final or beta release.

Microsoft is expected to announce Tuesday that it has partnered with Canon to include an all-new color matching system as part of the new operating system. The Windows Color System is designed, among other things, to help make digital photo prints that better match the images that appear on the screen.

"WordPress is a powerful tool, and in many ways exemplifies open source at its best. It gives any user an array of features with minimal technical effort, and its extensibility and versatility are displayed by the large pool of user-designed plugins. This power and versatility extends beyond WordPress's traditional use of blogging."

A surprising move by Microsoft: "MSDN Subscriber Downloads now supports Firefox! And Opera. Funnily enough, when we were doing the initial planning for our 3.0 platform I got some pushback from the dev team on this requirement because only .5% of our old site traffic was on a non-IE browser. After we realized that they were serious we got the requirement straightened out, only changing it from 'Mozilla' to 'Firefox' since that's the predominant browser."

In ever-growing numbers, CIOs want to take advantage of the many benefits that free and open-source software have to offer their companies. But there's a snag. Their lawyers can be grouchy when it comes to open-source.

Apple has seeded build 8B1027 to Apple Developer Platform owners. This build brings Transition Kit systems up to version 10.4.2, and in-sync with the current released version of Mac OS X for 'ordinary' Macs. This build includes new tactics to prevent piracy of Mac OS X.

Customization typically offers users the ability to manipulate shiny objects, but not much real power. Wouldn't it be better to put the time into supporting a more powerful and flexible user interface?

Geeks.com were very generous to send us in one of Sony Ericsson's best sellers: the very popular K700i. We took it for a quick spin and here is our mini-review.

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft is planning to provide programmers with the code for an early version of Vista, as well as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, both of which will be released in November. Vista, the client version of the next release of Windows developed under the code name Longhorn, is expected to be released next year. Screenshots of the PDC Vista build can be found here.

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."