What I'd like to see
1. A genuinely seperated spacial and browser environment, not one where the other pops up unexpectedly (browser users probably never get this, but spacial users get this with irritating frequency.)
2. An equivalent of the Explorer "File system tree" pane that can be brought up optionally when using the browser environment.
3. An end to unpredictable behaviour. For example: you have a window at the side of the screen, with one part of it slightly out of reach. You drag a file to it to drop it in a directory. Just as you release the mouse button, the window moves, and the file drops into the wrong directory. You undo, try again and the same thing happens. In the end, the only way to get this to work is to move the window, which this hack is supposed to alleviate the need to do. (Here's a suggestion, why not just let the user go to the side of the screen if the window's not completely visible, and as they "push" against the side, temporarily slide the window under the cursor into view?)
On a similar note, the thing that causes folders to automatically open if you either hit space or wait enough time when you're dragging and dropping is great, but please disable the "wait enough time" thing, because 90% of the time it comes up when I don't want it. There is nothing that undermines the whole drag-and-drop paradigm more than the computer second guessing you all the time. You can always make the "wait enough time" an option, but by default it should be disabled completely (rather than set to a couple of seconds as it is by default.) Likewise, once you've deliberately opened a window by hitting space while dragging and dropping, don't close it until the drag and drop operation is complete (or let us hit shift while hanging over the close button or something.)
If there's one thing I absolutely cannot stand about the "Mac way", it's the computer second guessing me all the time. If I want to do something, let me tell you I want to do it.
4. Either user controlled "gaps" between icons, or better, sane ones to begin with. I can set the font and icon size to something sane, but for some reason each icon ends up looking like there's enough space for ten more between each one.
5. Dock improvements. Folders should have easily customizable icons, or perhaps should even have icons that reflect, in some way, their contents. At the moment, if you drag four icons to the dock so you can use the otherwise useful right-click-menu-of-contents thing, only the ones that already look special will be "obvious". Mine right now on this Mac are: Applications, the root of my current Xcode project, Developer Applications, and my home directory. The home directory one, for reasons I can't explain, is a generic folder icon. The Applications one has an 'A' on the folder, which is the only way to distinguish between it and the Developer Applications, which has "Applications" as the mouse-over title. The icons are, naturally, slightly different on my Macs at home. Realistically, with the exception of the Applications folder, I have to mouse over them to know which is which.
The Dock should also be pinable (the functionality is there, just no already-enabled UI), and when pinned, adding icons should not result in shifts in position of existing icons. Why not separate it as "Minimized windows, non-docked apps, folders, docked apps, trashcan" for bottom/right orientation, or in that order reversed for top or left orientation? If the complaint is that those objects sound arbitrarily picked, why, yes, they are! But not any more than the default selection (how are minimized windows and folders alike again?)
6. Under no circumstances should the fact the desktop is full of icons mean that the icon representing the system disk should be overlaid with the icons of all newly created files. I'd actually like to see the desktop rethought anyway. My Amiga used to put icons on the desktop for files in the file system, but it wasn't treated as an actual directory, instead you had to select individual files and use the "Leave Out" menu command to get them to appear there. You didn't get the situation where every network application saw it as a great place to put all newly downloaded files. If you still have to implement the Desktop as a directory for some unknown reason, at least create a new home directory subdirectory called "Recently downloaded files", and encourage the developers of Firefox, Opera, etc, not to mention Safari, to put files in there by default.
7. Defaults in spacial mode should be an intelligent mix of the calculated (ie you open a folder nobody's ever opened before - take a look at how many files are in it, the current layout of the screen, etc, and come up with a moderately reasonable size, shape, and position) plus the All Windows Icons and Font settings. What's the point in having the "All Windows" option if it doesn't apply to windows by default? Once I customize a specific window (or someone else has - eg a folder on a .DMG, etc), then yeah, switch from "All Windows" but until then...
8. Finally, cheesy it might be, but a "Tip of the Day" thing that comes up when you start the system would be a great idea for an operating system that comes without a manual. I honestly never knew about the usefulness of folders in the dock until I read about it on the 'net. Nor the whole "Hovering over a folder while dragging and dropping and hitting shift to open it" thing. Mac OS X has many, many, features that are simply not obvious, but has no practical documentation. That needs to change.
