Adium: Tabbed chatting, custom backgrounds, what's not to love? Oooohhh that's right, ichat still holds the edge in tele/video conferencing, as well as screen sharing. For straight up text chatting however, Adium is the bees knees.
Parallels: It's a toss up between Parellels and VMWare, both are good. I can run my bootcamp partition as a virtual machine from within OSX, which is nifty, and Coherence mode tries to make it appear that the Windows apps are running natively in OSX.
Google Notifier: I use gmail and google calendar to organize my life. I figure iCal and Mail.app have gotta be slick, but I can't think of a reason to force myself to use either. iCal+Mail has a smart text functionality, where it can parse your emails for contact info, dates, etc., and makes those actionable items. However, I can send an sms to my gmail account, and I can sms a new entry to my google calendar, which is extremely nifty. Perhaps with Apple's new mobileme service they might be comparable to Google Apps, but seeing as Google Apps is free..... I dunno. Google Apps still wins with me.
NTFS-3G: I WOULD be using this every day if I could get it to work properly. I'm not a *nix noob, I'm perfectly fine with manually mounting and unmounting volumes, but I think having my NTFS formatted drive mounted while I installed ntfs-3g is causing me to have problems. So it's either reinstall ntfs-3g, or reformat my external drive.
