Give me a week and I'll have one of those two things posted. Promise.

1. Cisco VPN integration:  I know, I know.  It seems lame, but not having to deal with Cisco's clunky VPN client on the Mac is just so many shades of awesome. 
2. Microsoft Exchange support:  I find it more than a little humorous that Microsoft doesn't include this in its own operating systems.  Being able to hook in to Exchange for calendaring, contacts and email for no additional cost is great for individuals and even better for businesses.
3. Quicktime X:  No more will you be required to lay down the $30 for the "pro" features of Quicktime (editing, encoding, etc.).  Quicktime X brings a cleaner look and solid editing features.
4. Speed, baby:  I suppose this remains to be seen, but if everything performs as Apple claims, the performance improvements to the system are most welcome.
5. $29 Upgrade:  That's right.  All this goodness and more for a mere $29.  I suppose apple didn't feel right for charging the usual $180-ish for what amounts to a super duper service pack.  Folks that aren't running the most recent version of OS X, Leopard, will have to fork out $169 for the box set, which includes iLife and iWork in addition to the operating system.

For me, it isn't really any one feature that makes Snow Leopard worth the upgrade price.  Taken as a package, however, Snow Leopard really does remove some of the rough edges of Leopard and add in some future-looking features that will give developers a great foundation to build on.

Check out the Snow Leopard site for all the juicy details.

Today Apple released a free application that might actually make the service worth the cost.  The MobileMe iDisk app for the iPhone gives you remote access to to all the files you store in the MobileMe iDisk service.  While the features of the app are limited, they reflect the typical focus that Apple gives its products.

What can you do with iDisk on the iPhone?  Basically, three things: 

• Download and view files on your iPhone.  You're restricted to file types that are supported by the iPhone OS, like PDF, Word, and Powerpoint.  Also, any file over 20 MB won't be available for download.
• View files in public folders of other MobileMe members.
• Share files and folders.  This, to me, is the biggest feature.  Emailing large files around is clunky and riddled with failure.  Try email a 30 MB PDF to a friend and see how often it just disappears into the ether.  With iDisk, you email a link to the file, with an optional expiration date and password protection. 

In my brief experience with the app, I was pleased with the result.  An 1 MB PDF downloaded in a little over 3G wireless and popped open in the native PDF viewer.  Honestly, I won't be reading long files on the iPhone, but it's great for quick reads and confirmation of document contents.

Sharing files was as simple as selecting a document, entering an email address, and hitting the send button.  Good stuff.

Will this app sell more MobileMe subscriptions?  Maybe.  Coupled with the new "Find My iPhone" feature that lets you track down and optionally erase the data on your phone, this could be a good value proposition for the service.  For me, getting my data when and where I want is worth it.

iDisk Main WindowDocument ListDownload a FileFile Sharing

I remember when there were just Cheerios...

My first rational thought was that the meter reader had been drinking heavily the morning he came by and had trouble making out those blurry little dials.  I mean, how could anyone use 4375 kwh in a month!!!  

After calming down somewhat and looking over my bills for the past year, I have determined the blame lies at least somewhat on my own shoulders.  Here's what I figured out: 

1. Death by autopilot:  As per my agreement with Spark Energy, I have my bill automatically paid from my checking account every month.  I don't regularly look at the details of my bill, and typically just look to see if the final number is somewhat sane.  If I had been looking, I would have noticed some issues with my statements over the last 12 months. I blame myself for not taking the time to review the monthly statements, and this is just once more points out the need for me to get organized.  
2. Customer service, customer schmervice: The first thing I noticed about my statement was that my per kilowatt hour rate was significantly higher than I expected ($.1457 vs $.115).  It turns out that my contract had ended and my service had been moved to a variable monthly rate.  In July.  Of 2008.  I was not aware of this and Spark Energy had made no significant attempts to enlighten me.  Now, I understand that they wouldn't be compelled to have me lock in at a lower rate, but I had hoped that some sort of human decency might have moved them to notify me that I was throwing hundreds of dollars out the window.  Sigh.
3. Shopping CAN save you money: After discovering my current rate, I decided to shop around a bit for a better deal if I couldn't work things out with Spark Energy.  Lo and behold, I found that I could get electricity on the cheap at a number of different providers.  Compare the $.095/kwh that I found to the $.1457/kwh that I was currently paying, and my $660 bill would have been $440.  Encouraging, but also enough to make me sick that just this month I had lost $220.  In one month.
4. Maybe there is something to this conservation stuff:  Even if I can save some major coin with a provider switch, I know there's room in our energy usage to trim off significant fat.  I've decided to drop $239.95 on a TED 5000 energy monitor in order to track down the vampires that are sucking me dry of both electricity and cash.  The TED 5000 will let you see at any given moment how much juice you're using, and will track over time your usage patterns.  My hope is to cut 30% to 40% off of our electric bills over the next year, more than paying for the device.  Oh, and I like gadgets, so there's that.TED 5000

Maybe I'm not ready to drop $30,000 on solar panels and drop off the grid, and I still harbor a deep suspicion of all those tofu-eating, Prius-driving, compost-making Yippies.  Still, they may be on to something with this energy conservation stuff, and I'm willing to hear them out.  Just keep that tofu out of my face.  Seriously.

• Scala: Scala is a cool little functional language that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine.  It fixes a lot of things people think are broken in the Java language.   It's also the language the folks over at Twitter chose to replace some less than performant Ruby on Rails code.
• iPhone development:  Everybody and their mother wants to make an awesome iPhone app, including me.  So far, I've created a Slightly Reflective Smudgy Mirror.  
• Objective C:  Going hand in hand with the iPhone development, I need to get up to speed with Objective-C and Cocoa.  So far, Objective-C is making my brain hurt.  I suppose that's a good thing.
• Ruby on Rails: Another relatively new framework, RoR brings several concepts to light ("Don't Repeat Yourself" and "Convention over Configuration"),  that I would love to incorporate into my day job.

 Fun stuff for a geek like myself.  

That was about 3 months ago.  Now we're seeing the adoption of the medium by corporations, primarily for marketing purposes.  While I've not seen anything to invasive myself, I can't help but look ahead to where this trend will take us.  It's akin to the spam situation with email back before the days of reliable spam filters.  I'm hoping that the entrepreneurs using social media for marketing don't choke out the more meaty conversations that are going on.

I suppose if Twitter can't stay on top of the issue, at least they've given developers a good set of APIs to build some filters into the application.  Maybe I should get started on that now, before things get too bad.

I've had these same thoughts myself in the last few months, and Jeff puts these thoughts into words in his usual eloquent fashion.  For the entry fee of $99 and a Macintosh, developers have access to millions of potential customers with a minimum of effort for distribution.  Awesome.

The hard part is coming up with that killer app that takes advantage of all those luscious hardware features.  I think the flashlight and Twitter client space is well covered.

I feel that same level of devotion and care should be taken with the back-end services on which so many applications rely.  We're taking the web development model and stretching the distance between the user interface and the internal services in the development of mobile and desktop applications.  Poorly designed services and deployment mechanisms will only serve to detract from the user experience, even the ones with pretty faces.

 The difficulty lies in knowing when the design is good enough.  Well designed user interfaces go through innumerable iterations to get just the right colors, fonts and layouts to suit the purpose of the application.  I find it hard myself to know when I've got enough polish on the systems I create.  How granular should a set of services be?  What's the best balance between performance and ease of use?  I suppose that's part of learning the craft.