As I mentioned in the previous article, Leopard will come with a lot of great new features. But there’s always a few more you can use:

• Adium, a free instant messenger for Mac OS X. It supports:

• AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac)
• Jabber (Including Google Talk)
• MSN Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
• Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
• Gadu-Gadu
• LiveJournal
• Novell Groupwise
• QQ
• Lotus Sametime

• AppleJack is great for troubleshooting your disk. Just install and restart in Single User Mode to repair the disk, check system preferences and get rid of possibly infected cache files;

• For quick and easy (and free!) image editing, try ImageWell. It “lets you quickly resize, crop, watermark, edit your images, take screenshots and then upload them to the web, save to your computer or email them to a friend.”;

• Editing HTML in iWeb is now easier with iWebMore;

• For system maintenance, my picks are Onyx, which “allows you to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, to see the detailed info of your configuration, to preview various logs and CrashReporter-reports, to check the Preferences files and more” and TinkerTool, which “…gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X. This allows to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system.”;

• Check out SketchUp for an easy-to-use 3D modeling;

• I use SuperDuper for daily backups and have been very happy with it. It’s essential for creating a bootable backup of your hard drive, easy to set up and my favorite feature is Smart Backup, which will only back up the files to keep your external drive identical to your main hard drive;

• VLC Media Player, available for a variety of platforms, will play audio and video formats, in various encodings, as well as streaming media;

And, since you’ve read this far, here’s some really cool icons.