I like the idea of focusing on the functionality, not specific software, that could go into a 5th edition. It seems that stepping back and rethinking popular industry trends led to some of the unique and interesting decisions that gave us plan9 in the first place.
Here is what I'd like to see
-3D graphics (something akin to /dev/draw except for graphics pipelines)
-Location capabilities (gps, map drawing, routing)
-Mobile interface (clean, simple, optimized for small and touch screens)
-2D graphics editing (edit photographs or make raster art from scratch, layers, antialiasing, filesystem for scripting)
-3D printing (manipulate 3D model data, output one of the standard formats for printers)
-Knowledge/AI system (plug in statements, make inferences)
-Notifications (deliver events, alerts and reminders to my attention in a consistent manner)
-Search quickly for files based on content (indices, also accessible via 9P, there's a paper floating around about this)
-Easily find disk space statistics (free disk space for each file system)
-Single Instruction Multiple Data (language and compiler for writing programs that can use these special instructions)
-Video playback and recording (support for most popular 3 codecs, including one of the free ones, syncing of audio stream, record from camera and/or screen)
-Clean HTML (not fully featured web browser, instead render existing HTML in a clean, readable way, not unlike the various reader modes in popular web browsers, convert to PDF/PS)
I think that each of these can be done in the plan9 way with simple, consistent and elegant implementations that integrate well with the rest of the system. The focus is to enable capability and not necessarily to just port existing software, repeating existing complexity and bloat.
Chris
Any features that should be incorporated into Plan 9?