Here’s a couple of things I’d like to see for Dashboard in future release, at least as an option:

1. The first time Dashboard starts up, and sometimes when it hasn’t been used for a while, it takes a while for many of them to respond, even things like ‘Stickies’ and ‘Dictionary’ which are local. I presume it’s because many widgets access the Internet for the latest information, but there should be an option to either do this at startup (as Dashboard runs in the background anyway) rather than the first time it is invoked, and it should allow other widgets to be used whilst it’s doing it. This may just be because I am on a slower machine, though even on an iBook G3 it flies when it’s working, so I doubt this.
2. After a while, if you use a lot of widgets, you start to run out of space, despite being able to tile widgets. What would be nice is a way of having more than one widget ‘page’ – say one for games, one for searches, one for shell apps, all user-defined of course. This would remove the need to move/hide widgets or add/remove them from the main screen (which takes time) just to use the one you want. I currently have 17 widgets open and with judicious placement, they look good, but I don’t know how many more I’d happily accommodate, and given that Dashboard is about speedy access to applications, just adding and removing them from the dashboard toolbar is not an acceptable solution.

I have to say, though, that with new widgets being coded all the time, I am loving it more and more (it was a bit boring with just the default ones after the initial ‘wow’ factor of the desktop graphics)