I'd like to see an effect in photobooth (well this would really be iLife 2010) to automatically put a black turtleneck, blue jeans and white sneakers underneath your head.

That would be fun :P

recordable tv in fornt row,
stacks on desktop
shameless steal of with Windows 7 donut

I want to see advanced touch gestures brought to enlarged trackpads and touchscreens. Windows 7 will definitely be incorporating some 'surface' technologies, I hope Apple doesen't hold off in the desktop arena.

I'm ready to leave the mouse behind.

Improvements to Finder - I'm not sure what exactly, as I've got used to its quirks, but I still think I have to frig around to much when I'm using it.
Support for every common video format in Quicktime. And drop Quicktime Pro - just give us it all in one piece of software.
A quick way of hiding the dock so you can easily go full screen - and when I mean full screen, I mean the FULL screen.
The optional ability to pin desktop shortcuts in different spaces.
A better way to get to the menu using just the keyboard - I can never remember Ctrl-F2, and on laptops, you have press Ctrl-Fn-F2. Why not just holding down the key ?

- Finder - Show folders (alphabetically) then files (alphabetically)
- Finder - After seeing a computer to connect to, clicking "Connect As" should stop trying to keep connecting as a guest and bring up the authentication prompt straight away

Like the others have said;
- DivX & Xvid support
- iChat with msn support (including video)
- Write to NTFS

a option where u can pick if u want a 2D or 3D dock no matter wat side on bottom ect solves all issues of i want tiger dock i want 3D dock end it for once and for all apple

Things I wouldn't like:

• Native MSN support for iChat (Jabber is Open Source... Microsoft should change, not Apple).

And then things I would:

• 128*128 pixel avatars for iChat (larger would be ok too). 64*64 just sucks when all your friends use MSN.
• Another iChat one: In Bonjour, being able to show your Nickname, instead of your Full Name.
• Being able to capture screen videos.
• Being able to disable DVD Player preventing screenshots, even though it's in an entirely different space.
• I hear the GPU might be able to do H.264 Processing better than the CPU (or as well as or something..) so something that can use that for Quicktime encoding to a file would be nice. If that's not possible, then no biggie.
• Fix the bloody scroll bars. I have put iTunes-style Scroll Bars system-wide by replacing the Extras2.rsrc file with one I found on the internets... surely Apple could replace what the installer installs. Aqua is just not cool anymore. It's just so 2001.
• Vista has better voice recognition. Not good enough Apple.
• At least one new voice for text-to-speech. And maybe put all the old ones in a compressed dmg available for download and remove them from the OS (Agnes to an extent, Albert, Bad News, Bahh, Bells, Boing, Bruce to an extent, Bubbles, Cellos, Deranged, Fred, Good News, Hysterical, Junior, Kathy to an extent, Pipe Organ, Princess, Ralph, Trinoids, Whisper and Zarvox) Alex, Viki and Victoria can stay. Add some new (and good) ones to replace the (crap) old ones.
• Give me 3D. I want my Windows to be stacked on top of each other in three dimensions. Have some Expose thing where I can zoom in and out and go to the windows far behind without seeing the others, or all the way to the top of the pile with the others floating behind. Kinda like Time Machine without the repeated front window stretching back into a black hole.
• Surprise me with something I'm really going to want.

I was going to start typing "software RAID5 support, logical volume management, boot from software RAID1, etc", and then saw that. Yes, ZFS as a bootable, fully supported file system would definitely top my list for things to ask for.

The big problem I think will be case sensitivity. HFS+ is not case sensitive, (although it is "case preserving"), but I've seen cases where UFS causes desktop MacOSX to break (it's highly recommended to leave UFS for MacOSX Server installs only, and only with software that's well tested first). Any more modern file system will need to go through some pretty serious testing first, to sanity check all case sensitivity issues.

Anyways, number 2 on my list is full disk encryption. Apple's current "File Vault" only allows for the home folder to be encrypted, and only in sparce files. Sure, you can make encrypted disk images (or use third party stuff like TrueCrypt to do the same), but I work in a world of high security, and full-disk encryption with pre-boot authentication is almost mandatory for me. With that said, Sun are adding transparent encryption to ZFS, but it is only in alpha stage at the moment.

So it seems my first two wishes for 10.6 could plausibly both be satisfied by ZFS at some point.

Wish three would be time machine backups to any remote network file system I like. And if I could be greedy, that would include over ssh-encrypted rsync and standard scp/sftp.

macrumors and appleinsider a both posting that 10.6 could be relased in January 09, and won't work on PPCs!

personally, I think that that timeframe is too soon, but I would not be surpised at dropping ppc. I would expect an announcement of 10.6 next week, maybe a beta in January to developers,intense developer training at 09 WWDC, with release at the end of 2009. That sort of timeframe would also reduce the pain for ppc owners.

+1 on everything you've said.

ZFS was slated for use in Leopard, but it got dropped at some point along the line. Here's hoping it's just been 'maturing' in the background, and will appear in OS X.6.

Would be great to run it on my OpenSolaris server at home and my Mac OS X laptop

I believe that the reasons given for not including ZFS in Leopard were to do with maturity of the system. ZFS certainly looks to be extremely strong and will improve things considerably. But I guess they want to make sure it will work 100% and do so simply.

Previous poster has suggested NTFS writing - that's all down to MS and if they decide that they will allow that to happen, two arguments are - it's uncompetative not to - while it's going to impact MS if they do.

I really badly hope they dont drop PPC in 10.6 especially if its due as early as Jan 09. The best thing about macs is that they manage to continue running ther latest operating system as they get older and have always been able to do this to a much greater extent than any PC.

For example, i've had 10.4.x running on a B&W G3 350. This machine was released back in 1999? Or maybe even a couple years earlier. So it continued to run the latest release (albeit slow, but still useable) up until 2007 when 10.5 was released with only minor upgrades.

No PC that is 8 years old would be able to run a current release of windows. Similar example could be used of a Pentium 2 350mhz trying to run vista. Not possible.

If Apple blocks out PPC then its forcing every mac user to have a machine thats 2 years old maximum to run their latest OS. I really think this would be a bad choice as the majority of users, probably cant upgrade.

The ability to use the scroll wheel while dragging a folder or file.

Good Back to my Mac software, that can be used with the new iPhone would be great, think that is a common theme.