If you use Google chat (if you use iSkubmail than you do). Head over to the Google Chat site and download this plugin to have voice and video in your Google chats!

Mailplane has simply become one of my “can’t live without” Mac apps after shortly installing the trial, followed promptly by a purchase…

How so?

Mailplane is a desktop app that completely integrates your Gmail/Google Apps mail into a desktop email client that even adds functionality to Gmail, not just letting you access it, which you can do with things like Fluid.app.

So what makes Mailplane so great? First off, you don’t need a browser window open all the time. Second, you don’t have to use Mail.app. Mail.app is fine… but doesn’t give you threaded conversations, and labeling and starring of messages (both of which are reasons you would choose Gmail). Mailplane lets you have access to all of these, right in the app, no browser required. Pic of Mailplane.app running below!

Growl notifications: This is a huge one for me. If you don’t have Growl than you should, plain and simple, the first thing I install on any Mac. You can add Growl notifications to Mail.app with tricky hacks (that aren’t Leopard friendly), but Mailplane just does it better. You get quick, easily readable message notifications (and other notifications). Fantastic!

Image plugins: Mailplane perfectly integrates into Mac OS imaging to let you quickly browse and add files to an email, and you can ever send images directly from iPhoto with automatic resizing.

All in all, Mailplane lets you use a desktop email client in THE way you should in 2008, not using a “pull” mail app, which is getting very “year 2000″ incredibly quickly these days…

If I could some up Mailplane perfectly I would say it is a perfect extension and integration of Gmail into Mac OS. Nothing is better than perfect integration! Bravo!

Finally… Mailplane (download here) is $24.95 for a single user (2 Mac) license, but can be had for $17.95 if you are a college student. Thanks for discounting for us college students! I wish more developers did this…

Found this funny little tidbit after updating Leopard to 10.5.2 today. It seems I have Finder version 10.5.3…

I always thought that you can’t have a version of Finder that is newer than your OS, but maybe that’s just me…

In other 10.5.2 news you can now turn off the transparent menubar in Desktop & Screensaver and we now have a handy Time Machine menubar item which really helps with usability, bye bye Time Machine dock icon

You can now also display a Stack with the icon of the Folder instead of whatever the last item placed in that Stack was. This is great! No more crappy Stack icons!