A couple more far-out ideas (hardly original, but never actually implemented in any OS AFAIK):
Dynamic folder (and possibly file) icons. Generic folder icons are useless, and really cripple the usefulness of the Dock. Hardly anyone will (or would even know how to) go to the trouble of making custom icons for their various folders, and without custom icons, you can really only put one or two in the Dock before it gets way too confusing. Same goes for files.
There have been many ideas on how such dynamic icons ought to work. One obvious method is for folders' icons to have visible files popping out the top, and have the number (and maybe appearance) vary based on the contents of the folder. Another idea I've heard (sorry, I forget where; probably from either Bruce Tognazzini or David K. Every) is to have something like a spider web or "dust" accumulate on icons to show the time it's been since its last access.
Another logical idea is to have a folder's icon change depending on the TYPE of file it mostly contains. I admit it would be hard to make such a system really smart (for example, my Applications folder should certainly have an Application-related icon, even though the majority of files in it are not applications), but it certainly shouldn't be impossible. It also wouldn't be terrible to have an easy-to-use system that requires some user interaction.
File tags. Labels have always been great, but the problem is that you can only apply ONE to any given file. I'd like to be able to create my own tags and apply any number of them to any file or folder. This would be similar to the way Gmail handles things. Apple has already begun implementing an infinitely-extensible metadata structure into the HFS+ file system (it works in Tiger, but only at the BSD level; there are still no high-level APIs for using it). I expect it to be complete in Leopard, and I really hope Apple uses it. A LOT. It has a lot of potential, and would make Spotlight all the more appealing.
If these tags could be represented on the file's icon, that would also help the issue I mentioned above. I'm imaging a little "stack" of labels hanging on the icon, and with a particular action, you could have than fan out so you could see the exact contents. It would be very useful, and would offer some great eye candy, to boot.
Auto-naming of "untitled" files. This can't really be done completely on a system-wide level, but Apple could at least make it easy for Cocoa developers and blaze the trail with their own apps. For example, when I create a clipping, it's automatically given a meaningful name. The same should be true of all text files. I'm not asking for much just a meaningful name in the Save dialog for newly-created files, based on the content of the file at the time of saving. As a programmer, I can already imagine the neat little hooks Apple could build into Cocoa to make this easy for developers, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
The return of WindowsShade, or something like it. The Dock-based minimization, while neat and useful in its own right, has NEVER been a true replacement for the OS 8-style WindowShade feature. I realize you can get it with WindowShade X, but the idea of paying for a feature I got for free 8 years ago is just sad. And Apple could take it one step further: Make the collapsed windows their own KIND of Window, not just a standard title bar. Make it so for existing apps, it would behave just like a floating title bar, but give developers the ability to use this collapsed-state window to show vital data about the window itself, e.g. a progress bar or status report.
While we're on the subject of long-lost Mac features...what ever happened to tear-off menus? Like the Application menu in OS 8/9, or the Tools menu in HyperCard. This could be a standard feature for all menus (or at least provide the necessary hooks for programmers to do it themselves; AFAIK it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do this in Cocoa as it stands). Sometimes I want quick access to my menus, and I know a lot of people avoid using menus like they avoid getting root canals, because for those with less mouse dexterity (like my mother), they're just painfully frustrating.
A fourth Exposé mode: Scatter the
current application's windows. A lot of the time when I'm in Safari, for example, I want to quickly check the status of, say, a video I'm encoding in QuickTime. It'd be nice to get Safari out of my face for just a second.
Icon-by-icon size options in the Finder. I think there was a hack to get this done in 10.0, but I guess it's not possible anymore. It would be very cool to be able to make the really important or most-used items in a folder larger than the rest. There could even be some user-definable default rules for this. (Although I don't expect that, because Apple has become quite cowardly in recent years when it comes to interface design, and this would represent a real design challenge. But then again, I would have said the same thing about Automator before Tiger, and they did a pretty good job with that. Maybe things are turning around.)
The ability to transparently open zips and other archive types like folders (or perhaps disk images). This would really not be that hard to do; they already do most of the necessary gruntwork with compressed DMGs, after all.
