I don’t so much care for the hardware announcements (Mac Pro? Xserve? Some surprise?) as I’ve just bought a new piece of Apple hardware several months ago, so it wouldn’t be in my budget anyway and won’t be any time soon.

I do, however, very much (and increasingly) care about the OS X-related announcements; read: Leopard.

Here’s a few things I’m hoping for:

• Brushed Metal begone. Obviously, Apple is moving towards ‘dark unified’, ’smooth metal’ or whatever you prefer to call it. That-look-first-seen-in-iTunes-5, y’know.
• Resolution independent UI. I’ve always felt this would be more than just a slider like we currently see it in Quartz Debug. What I personally envision, although questionable from a Usability point of view, is the ability to hold the option key while draggin the resize knob in order to change a window’s resolution (and thus its physical size as it appears on screen), while maintaining how its contents are displayed. In other words, for every single window, you could have a different ’size’, so you could make some windows appear ‘closer’ (bigger) and others ‘farther’ (smaller). Dan Wood of Karelia (Watson, Sandbox) fame talked about this on Saturday. Now that he posted about it first, nobody will believe that I had the idea before him. Bummer. Seriously though, something tells me there’ll be more than just an amount-of-ppi GUI setting (either in the Appearance preference pane, or the Displays one).
• File-system-level versioning. This is perhaps the one thing left in Vista that I’m actually looking forward to, beyond just a ‘meh’. Tiger introduced extensible attributes, and HFS plus has always had support for many forks (not just two), so it would be easy to implement this. I’d like it to go to the point where old versions are automatically compressed (zip? stronger compression may be too slow to be on-the-fly/seamless) so they don’t waste space. That, and binary diffs, please. This would truly rock. For the ‘what happens if you delete’ concern, the folder containing the file would hold archives too. For the ‘what about privacy’ concern, Panther introduced secure delete; this would obviously be enhanced to undo versioning, too. Versioning would rock. (And single-handedly kill Retrospect. Which Dantz in their infinite arrogance deserve. SuperDuper! and similar cloning tools, on the other hand, would “automagically” become even more useful.) Update: got it. This one I’m especially proud of since this wasn’t rumored on any site as far as I’m aware, nor was it particularly obvious. This might even make SuperDuper! useless, they way they’ve implemented this.
• Transparent compression and encryption. Like NTFS does it.
• User-level file systems. Don’t make every file system a kernel extension. FUSE can do it on Linux; surely it’s possible on OS X as well. Give us a proper layer. What I’d like the most is a network file system for SFTP. I personally don’t have much use for ZFS and the like, but there seems to be huge interest in those, too. Of course, write support for NTFS would be swell, but I wouldn’t count on it.
• Spotlight improvements. I don’t even know where to start on this. It’s a great technology but it needs so much work. I’m sure Apple is aware, and I’m sure we’ll see some fantastic enhancements in this area, be it regarding performance (why is it sometimes extremely fast and sometimes extremely slow, even for the same exact query?) and user interface (either make it a real app, or integrate it into the Finder and get rid of the separate window). Update: got it, but details are vague.
• Obligatory FTFF. Duh. For example, I want a way to manually refresh, since many file systems simply don’t have notification and require polling, which is slow.
• Networking and pluggable databases for Core Data. Imagine being able to hook your Core Data app into a remote MySQL server. Need I say more?
• Objective-C garbage collection. Kinda pointless to mention since we pretty much know it’s coming. I don’t feel high-level apps should have to deal with memory management. I’m sorry; I just don’t. End of story. Update: got it.
• VoIP and better network traversal in iChat. I’ve never seen Skype’s network traversal fail. Anywhere. So it ain’t rocket science. Make iChat’s work that well, too.
• World map application. With streets, satellite photography, directions and all. A stand-alone Google Maps / Yahoo Local Maps / Windows Live Earth. Heck, use one of their APIs or their content, if that makes things easier. Integrate with Address Book. Integrate with iChat (”where is this person?”). Why would I use a web app when I can have a desktop app?
• Extensible Dictionary. I’m sure Apple doesn’t much care to add international or more thorough dictionaries to their Dictionary application. Fine, let us do it. Let us plug in Wiktionary, or Dictionary.com, or whatever.

Guess that’d be a good start. I’m sure there’ll be quite a few exciting things I can’t even think about.

Update: They only showed a part, keeping a lot secret. This bodes well for other ideas of mine being correct.