“Panic”, an Apple software developer, has released one of the nicest browser extensions I’ve ever seen. Coda Notes makes it very easy to markup a web page with your own comments and highlights. The annotated page can then be emailed to whomever you like. To use Coda Notes you’ll need the very latest version of Safari – 5.0.1.

Once you install it, Coda Notes adds a little leaf button to the Safari button bar. When you click it, a toolbar slides down and the current web page goes into edit mode. You can draw on the page using a pencil tool (in green, red or blue), you can draw using a highlighter (in yellow, purple or blue), you can change the text on the page or you can put sticky notes with text on top of the page.

When you’re done, click the Send button and the whole page rotates to reveal a postcard on the back. You can email the annotated page with comments to whomever you wish.

Here’s a quick view of an annotated page after it was received in email:

Coda Notes is already very slick and very useful, but a few flaws keep it from replacing Skitch for me. The first is that it doesn’t have a tool to draw boxes and arrows yet. The second is that you can only annotate and send the visible portion of the web page. It would be much more useful if you could scroll up and down the entire web page.

One more thing to keep in mind if you make use of the Coda Notes extension, all emails are routed through the Panic servers. Panic has a good reputation and state up front that they don’t keep images, but if you’re at all concerned about security, don’t email your images.

I just started a new job and they forcefully apply an email signature to all outgoing Exchange email. The signature block is dynamic and picks up the senders name, phone number, email address, etc. from Active Directory and puts it in the signature. I sent myself a test email and saw that some of the information was wrong, so I contacted the email admin. He fixed it and asked me to test it again.

When I sent myself another test email it came through as plain text without any formatting. The company signature block is supposed to have formatting and a company logo. I was positive the email admin had messed things up. I was wrong.

Turns out the automated Exchange signature block is output in rich text (HTML) when the incoming message is rich text and is output in plain text when the incoming message is in plain text.

Mail.app has a setting that says whether messages will be composed as Rich Text or Plain Text. I had always assumed that applied to all new messages. Unfortunately it’s now apparent that the setting only means that a message can be sent as Rich Text. If you don’t include any formatting in your message then the message goes out as Plain Text, regardless of the composition setting.

The fix? Create a simple signature block with formatting. My first choice was a simple single-pixel line but Mail.app won’t accept a formatted line without any associated text. So now I just have the word ‘Thanks’ in bold.

http://www.crn.com/security/226200161

Google’s first big government switch to Google Apps has hit a roadblock that will be common to all cloud implementations – security.

The LAPD put the brakes on the City of Los Angles conversion due to security requirements. That includes the big concern all cloud users have, data segregation. In addition, the LAPD requires background checks on all personnel who have access to their data.

Google will work through this process of course and the end result will become standard practices for all cloud providers. Namely the establishment of strict data controls both from the technical perspective and from the personnel perspective.

Here’s another microtip for you. If you have a recent Mac that supports automatic GPU switching, you might have decided that OS/X isn’t smart enough about when it decides to switch. Maybe you run 1Password or The Hit List and can’t fathom why they need the high-powered GPU. So, when you head out on the road, you use gfxCardStatus to “pin” the operating system on the low-powered Intel GPU and give your battery a break.

The problem comes when you go to project a presentation. Suddenly, reliable OS/X won’t do it. Try as hard as you can, click Detect Displays as often as you like – no projection, no secondary display.

Why? Because OS/X requires the high-powered GPU to connect a secondary display like a projector. But there’s no visible error messages or feedback. The connection simply won’t work. To solve the problem just switch gfxCardStatus back to automatic mode.

If you’re running IntelliJ on Mac or Linux and use Subversion, don’t upgrade to the new 9.0.3 release. There’s a huge defect that JetBrains doesn’t seem to care about. With the new 9.0.3 release IntelliJ no longer uses the Mac or Linux password keychains. That means all of your passwords will stop working and you will have to manually edit configuration files to get everything working again.

You can find more information in the IDEA-56464 defect. The end result is that you will be required to store all of your passwords in plain text. For those of you on corporate networks that use ActiveDirectory to provide single sign-on to your Subversion instances that means you’ll have to store that password in plain text.

This is completely unacceptable and will keep me on 9.0.2 until this defect is fixed.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/windows-phone-7-dont-bother-disaster-211?page=0,0

I won’t leave you in suspense, the review is bad. Really, really bad. The reviewer works for Infoworld and took part in an in-depth demo of the platform. The reviewer, Galen Gruman, doesn’t pull any punches. Some choice quotes:

“Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.”

“…awkward and unsophisticated…[it’s like a great movie trailer], only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.”

“Under the hood, Windows Phone 7 rests on creakingly old technology that the main competitors have all moved past.”

“Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone.”

“Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.”

“The developers at Mobile Beat quickly recognized the labor-intensity of this UI method and one asked the Microsoft rep if anyone had bothered to test it with users. The answer was essentially "no” — a scary thought indeed."

“If the Windows Phone 7’s flaws were confined to a poor UI, that wouldn’t be a deal-killer for many users. … But under the hood, Windows Phone 7 gets worse. The core problem is its backward set of technologies, which will fundamentally limit IT, developers, and users alike.”

“Its browser is Internet Explorer 7, with some IE8 capabilities added — that means it does not support HTML5, as the iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Nokia Symbian all do.”

“Microsoft has a long history of producing bad software and plugging away on it for a few versions — usually version 3 — until it is serviceable. But that "get it right in version 3” strategy won’t work this time. … Microsoft has no establishment advantage in mobile today, so delivering an outdated, hamstrung mobile OS and hoping to fix it later just won’t fly."

“… Windows Phone 7 was Redmond’s equivalent of the bungled Hurricane Katrina response effort.”

“If the iPhone is the platinum standard, Android is the gold standard, WebOS is the bronze standard, and Symbian and BlackBerry tie for tin. Windows Phone 7 is clay — a clay pigeon, in fact.”

“Microsoft needs to kill Windows Phone 7 and avoid further embarrassing itself by shipping this throwback. It’s not a question of whether Windows Phone 7 will fail — it will— but how long it will take Microsoft to admit the failure. For the company’s sake, the earlier it fesses up, the better.”

Unmentioned in this blisteringly bad review is Microsoft’s one ray of hope – Silverlight and the Development Environment for Windows Phone 7. I have no idea whether apps perform well and use the battery sparingly on Windows Phone 7. Right now, no one but the development team at Microsoft do. But the SDK is available, and while its not garnering huge excitement, it does show an environment that will be very familiar to existing Visual Studio and Silverlight developers. Microsoft has gotten very, very good at IDEs and development toolsets and that might entice a new set of developers to roll into the mobile space. And if the tools are good enough it might make them more productive as well.

Unfortunately, if Windows Phone 7 continues to get reviews like this one, no one will buy the phones and no one will buy the software that’s produced for them. Hopefully for the sake of competition they’ll get their acts together by release time.