There are a gaggle of Spotlight search engine enhancer applications, most of them shareware or demoware, but for some reason, I'm not sure exactly why, little freeware SpotInside tends to turn up the most useful collection of results for my purposes, and displays them in a very convenient and useful fashion - Updated with version 0.7.2 release notes

Adium is an Open Source, Mac-only application that allows you to wrangle several different instant messaging protocols into one convenient (and customizable) interface. It is ridiculously simple to configure, and has the intuitive, elegant interface that all Mac applications should have.

"iTunes" For Your Font Library; the font utility FontBook should have been, and it's free

Scribble. Write. Remember.

Puts a convenient, user-friendly UI on screen captures, but does it offer $15 worth of value over OS X's built-in screenshot functions?

Optical disk-burning on the Mac is pretty simple, never more so than with OS X 10.4 Tiger, but the OS still doesn't support convenient multi-session disk burning.

License Keeper is clean, it's stable, and it does what it says it can do at a price that's worth it. If you're tired of keeping your software registration information in word processing documents or buried under dozens of e-mails, License Keeper may be just what you need.

Think of it as iPhoto for PDFs

Charles Moore reviews Google Desktop 1.0.1.126

Toast 8 Titanium is now blurry. I'm not sure why this is. Some of the GUI is very clean and quite "Tiger"-like in its appearance. And yet, for some reason, when you're setting up a disc to burn or are actually burning it, the type seems like it's been washed in a pair of pants. I mention this because there's hardly anything else wrong with Toast 8 Titanium, and I figured I'd get my main complaint out of the way early.

While having a lot of fonts can be fun and/or provide a tremendous amount of potential graphic benefits, the more fonts you have open at any given time, the more chance the performance of your computer will be severely degraded. However, regardless of the quality of all of your fonts, it's hard to part with any of them. If you are like me, you could easily have upwards of over 3,000 fonts on your computer. This is where font management comes in. A font manager lets you control which fonts are actively running on your computer at any time and lets you stop and start fonts at any time. In other words, a good font manager lets you have your cake and eat it too. Speaking of which, FontAgent Pro (FAP) is an excellent font manager.

Frustrated with Spotlight's angularities? Give these utilities a try.:
• EasyFind 3.9 Search Utility
• HoudahSpot 1.4.8 File Search Tool
• Laserlight 2.0.3 Bypasses "Find-As-You-Type"
• Locator 0.7.3 Freeware File Name Search Utility
• MoRU: Smarter Enhanced Spotlight Interface For Smarter Searches
• NameFind 2.0 Filename Search Utility
• SpeedSearch 2.3 Text Content Search Utility
• SpotInside 0.2.8 Spotlight Search Enhancer
• Spotlaser 1.3.1 Spotlight Enhancer