It’s quite simple really – I don’t want a smaller MacBook Pro. I like my 17″ screen. Now, slimmer… well, who doesn’t want that? Although the current “obese” MBP  is fine. My wish would be longer battery life and, more importantly, more RAM and a larger hard drive. I just bought a 200 GB / 7200 rpm drive that I’m looking forward to installing – just after Steve announces an 8GB/400GB configuration… Sigh.

On the iPhone front, I’m holding out for a 3G version. I travel sooo much to Europe and Asia that having to suffer through a “20th century” network like Edge is just… well… painful. Of course if it supported Flash (being an Adobe evangelist, of course) would be enough justification. However, on that note, I watched Mike Downey misspell an email three/four times tonight – and that was just the flippin’ email address!! My Nokia e61i has been a solid and reliable phone/pda. And the fact that I KNOW what key I’m pressing makes it easy to (don’t tell the cops) sms while I’m driving. And for those that think that you shouldn’t be interacting with your phone while driving – well, I have a GPS unit that works with my phone. Hmmm… you HAVE TO interact with a GPS unit while driving… unless you’re in the 1% that actually pulls over and types in your destination.

iPod… well, mine works fine for what I use it for – listening to music. I have been known to watch the occasional video on it, but that is truly the exception. And doing that on my phone…?! Give me 96 hour battery life and I might be tempted – but those of us who live on the road live by the mantra of conserving your phone battery ’cause you never know when you’re gonna be stuck for hours on end with no way to charge.

For Apple’s third party developers (of which, we at Adobe are one), I want apps that make me more productive. Microsoft, I want… no I NEED a new version of Office – NOW!!! But I want it to have feature parity with its Windows counterpart. Entourage sucked. Outlook 2007 rocks on the PC, but it bums me out to have to continually launch VMWare Fusion just to check my email. I want a REAL email client on the Mac. I’ve tried Apple Mail, and it’s very “decent”. But the fact is, at Adobe, we are an Exchange client and without full, no holds barred, and no workaround access to my calendar, Mail just doesn’t cut the butter.

For the rest of the software community – amaze me! Give me apps that make me think “how could I have existed without this”.

Here’s looking for an exciting Macworld Expo 2008! Prost!!

There’s only a little over a week left until we’ll be wow’ing the crowds in Scandinavia with a full day of seminars. If you happen to live in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki or Oslo, make sure to check out your regional adobe.com site under the events section for all the details.

In a nutshell, we’ll be doing two separate seminars. The first seminar is a four hour seminar in the morning focusing on cross-media web workflows, in which we’ll look at prototyping for the web, designing standards-based XHTML sites, creating and publishing video for the web and creating interactive Flash content. In the afternoon, we’ll turn our attention to Rich Internet Applications using Flex, and then taking those applications (or building entirely new ones) to the desktop using Adobe Air. My colleague, Mike Downey, and I will take you through using Dreamweaver, Flash and/or Flex to build the next generation of internet-enabled desktop applications in Air.

Well, I’m off to the Adobe office in San Francisco for an all day meeting on Tuesday, during which we will be discussing how to improve our outreach into the community of Adobe software users. It sounds so cliche to say that it is our users that make Adobe software what it is – but, in fact this is very true. With each product cycle, our development teams visit and listen to hundreds, if not thousands of customers – gathering their likes and dislikes, their challenges and workarounds and their wildest dreams – in order to come up with new features or simply enhance existing features. But during the intervening 18-24 months before a new software release, it falls to groups such as mine, the Evangelism teams, to help keep up the sales and marketing momentum as well as to establish relationships with our users.

While we think we have done a pretty good job at establishing relationships in the community, we realize that there is still a lot of work to be done. We’ll be brainstorming ideas on Tuesday, but I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could be better at our job.

Some open questions from my side – how do you make a decision to upgrade or purchase new software? Do you simply read reviews on the web? Talk to colleagues? Do you attend seminars or trade shows? How about online seminars? Do you find them as effective (or perhaps even more effective) than an in-person seminar?

I’ll be eagerly awaiting your responses – and ready to pass my findings on to the “heads-that-be”… Prost!