Long ago, when the site was but a young thing, I used to regularly cover the minor OS X releases. I haven't done that for quite a while, but I felt yesterday's release of the 10.4.3 update merited at least some mention here--it's the largest system update (in terms of number of changes, at over 500) Apple has ever released, and they snuck in some relatively interesting new features. There are also probably some new glitches introduced, though I've only run into one area of confusion so far (covered in a separate hint today).
So I thought I'd at least list a few of the minor things that I've discovered so far, none of which would really be 'hint-worthy' on their own merits.
- If you use Mail, you can now set your own font family and size for the mailbox list. My message list and mailbox list are finally in the same font!
- Also in Mail, when you forward or reply to a message, they got rid of some of the extra blank lines (though they left the one at the top, above the quoted text)
- iChat now has an encrypted chat feature, as long as all participants are on .Mac. Yes, this is a ploy to sell more .Mac subscriptions, but in this case, I think it's a legit need -- Apple is using .Mac as the issuing authority for the security certificates, and each .Mac subscriber gets one automatically when they first run iChat in 10.4.3. I tested this with a couple .Mac buddies, and it seems to work well. There's a slight lag when sending and receiving messages, but it's hardly notable. File transfers go somewhat slower, and I did have problems sending pasted images -- sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't.
- iChat smileys can be disabled easily from the menu! Hooray! Just choose View: Hide Smileys. No more unintended smiles when trying to send lists, etc.
- X11 windows now pop forward as they should when you activate X11 via the Dock or Command-Tab switcher.
- Quartz 2D Extreme has been permanently disabled, meaning that these hints no longer work in 10.4.3. Apple claims there were kernel panic and window redraw issues with it, and that the feature is 'not supported' in Tiger.

