I just saw an interesting plugin for OS X called 
Nudge. OS X has an irritating tendency to space-out changes in folders: you can download a file, go and look for it, and have it not be visible in the folder you're looking in for tens of seconds. Nudge lets you force the Finder to go off and refresh the contents of the window. I've thought that 10.3 was somewhat better about this than earlier versions, but I'm still looking forward to having it.