Next month, Apple will give developers their first public preview of the next major upgrade for Mac OS X, called Leopard. As ussual, there are rumors flying around about big new features like collaboration, video conferencing and it might even let you make free phone calls over the internet.

It's all just rumors for now, but big glossy features aren't what I really want to see out of Leopard. In past releases, Apple revamped some of the functions we use so often we don't even notice them such as printing and now we can take any document we've created in any application and turn it into a PDF or send it as a fax.

Many other everyday tasks could use this kind of attention.

Fonts
When Font Book was added in Panther it had fonts grouped by theme and allowed you to organize them into your own categories, but it began an ended with Font Book. No application has seems to have any idea I created groups of "headings" or "body type" and just shows me the big, long, alphabetically sorted, list of every font on your computer that we've had since the dawn of time. Can't we do better than this?

Open/Save as... dialog boxes
These don't look much different than in classic. It's cramped, you click on a file name instead of a folder by mistake and suddenly mac os is asking if you want to save over it. The only real advancement it's made in the last decade is adding the Finders shortcut sidebar, yet if I could change them my save to shortcuts would be much different than my finder shortcuts.

Spotlight
I'm constantly disapointed with it's slow response in searches, which leads to new results sliding into place in a list I was trying to scan. More than once I'd just found the document I was looking for, when it slid off the list and I had to click the "more..." link. I've also been very bothered by the choice to show only the top 5 matches in categories that don't always make sense, such as my illustrator documents not showing up in images because they are saved in PDF, or why I can't put documents ahead of images in the results. Actually my real issue there is that in the Spotlight system preference you can arrange the order the results get shown in, but it only effects the spotlight menu in the upper right, not the search results in a finder window.

I have quite a few more, but these are three areas, unglamorous as they might be, I'd like to see get some attention.