QuickTime? Thanks, I have already got VLC!

We all know that Macs are sold with literally Gigabytes of software goodness. Buit-in viewers, editors, mail, browser, even IDE for those programmers who drops .NET and Java frameworks in favor of Cocoa. But is everything so good as we would expect? Well, the answer is very difficult and requires classification of you as a user.

If you are a power user who likes to do boring things in style, and if you are happy with those features that cover needs of 95% of all users - then you can live with all titles from Apple. But if you are a fresh switcher, or if you belong to 5% of people who always needs more than they got - then you definitely need replacement to some Apple software.

I am something in between those who belong to 95% and those 5%. I can live with most things I have, but I open to alternatives if they can offer better value. In case of software that comes pre-installed with a new computer, you should be quite motivated to look for something else that can beat something provided for free. This is why Microsoft gets accused in abusing the monopoly. But exactly as in case of Microsoft, there are some free alternatives which in most regards are better than programs provided together with operating system.

While it is questionable whether Firefox is really better than Safari, Apple's own browser, it is a safe bet to assume than anyone who ran Firefox on other platform, will do it on Apple, too. Anyone who is in love with Firefox's plug in system, will miss all the functionality that comes with extensions. But for most tasks, Safari is just as great. So, if sites you are usually viewing, are not hostile to "small browsers", then you are fine with Apple's own offering.

iTunes, iDVD, GarageBand, iCal, Mail - all these are fine things you will hardly need to replace. But QuickTime, in my humble opinion, is not that friendly as Mac program could be. You can add codecs to enable playback of different files, but this is ot what average user will do. I was wondering if Apple really forces people to switch to QuickTime Pro, for-money version of its media player, until I found a beautiful program called VLC. This is freaking awesome media player. It plays everything right out of the box. It is surprisingly lightweight for an application that is ported to several platforms. It even plays DVD of any region, if you just specify where VIDEO_TS folder is. Just great.