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Better, Free Replacements for OS X’s Bundled Software

The software that comes pre-installed on every Mac is great, don’t get me wrong. But just because it’s already installed doesn’t mean that it’s the best available. Here’s a list of superior replacements for some of OS X’s bundled applications — and you won’t have to pay a dime to upgrade.

Adium > iChat

Adium [screenshot] is a highly customizeable client for just about any internet chat service you could imagine. Whereas iChat is constrained to AIM and Jabber accounts, Adium supports (among many others) MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and even XFire via a plugin. Adium also offers chat logging, Growl notifications, and hundreds of custom themes, icons, and sound sets.

In fact, all iChat has on Adium is videoconferencing ability. If you are dependent on your webcam you can stick it out with iChat, but for your own sanity at least install Chax.

VLC > Quicktime

Quicktime gives Windows Media Player a run for its money as the suckiest media player of all time. It nags you to upgrade and comes installed with a truly pitiful selection of codecs. Enter VLC [screenshot], the awesome cross-platform media player with playlists, myriads of video options, and support for nearly every video format you can find. Using its “open disc” feature you can bypass FBI warnings and previews, as well as play ripped DVDs just as if they were real.

Skim > Preview

Preview is a great, lightweight image viewer, but when it comes to PDFs it is a bit thin on features. Skim [screenshot] is a dedicated PDF viewer that lets you mark up PDFs with notes and highlighting. Since most professors post lecture slides as PDF files, Skim is all I need to take notes in class. It also has a beefed up search and many features that, previous to its release, were exclusive to Satan’s only major software release: Adobe Reader for Macintosh.

MenuMeters > Activity Monitor

Depending on your use of Activity Monitor, MenuMeters [screenshot] may or may not be a literal replacement. Most people don’t even know Activity Monitor exists, let alone what it does or why MenuMeters does it better. Activity Monitor is in your utilities folder, and it’s basically your computer’s EKG.

MenuMeters puts crucial statistics that most people use Activity Monitor to view, such as CPU load and RAM usage, in the menubar. By looking at these little indicators, I can tell how fast I am downloading and uploading, whether it’s time to reboot my computer, and if my processors are thinking or stalled out because of an error. You won’t really know how useful MenuMeters is until you’ve installed it and find yourself checking it regularly.

The Unarchiver > BOMArchiveHelper

BOMArchiveHelper is a hidden application that helps you out by packaging and unpackaging certain compressed archive formats. Whenever you open a .zip file or select “create archive” from a contextual menu in the Finder, BOMArchiveHelper is doing the work. Unfortunately, it won’t do you any good with other compression formats like .rar and .hqx.

But wherever BOMArchiveHelper fails, The Unarchiver [screenshot] succeeds. Its list of supported formats is so long that it produces a scrollbar.

Smultron + Bean > TextEdit

If you code or just like to write in plain text, there are about a million options available to you. The best free one is Smultron [screenshot]. Smultron mixes a simple interface with powerful syntax recognition and organization capabilities. If you’re working on a website or have several plain text files of notes for a certain subject, you can save them as a Smultron project file, which, when opened, will bring up the entire group of text files at once.

When you need to get fancier than plain text and TextEdit’s limited capabilites bum you out, don’t immediately turn to Microsoft Word. Bean [screenshot] is a slick rich text editor that gives you 90% of Word’s features with 0% of the pain. Since Microsoft Office for Mac is epic phail on my Intel processor, I write all my papers in Bean — and I’m about 400 MB of RAM better for it.

Camino > Safari

Camino [screenshot] is the only application on this list that is more of a recommendation than a replacement, because I actually use Safari and think it’s great. I have the luxury of being able to satiate Safari’s monster appetite for RAM, but on an older Mac Camino is probably the way to go. It runs on the same engine as Firefox, but its appearance and performance are much better tuned for OS X.

Appfresh > Software Update

Software Update’s largest deficiency is that it’s blind to all of the third party applications you install on your Mac. Sure, those punks at Apple will tell you when iTunes 7.4 is released so that you can wallow in self-pity upon seeing the iPhone-specific features, but they won’t let you know whether all of your freeware and shareware is up to date.

AppFresh [screenshot below] does exactly that. By polling software download sites, it will determine if you’ve got current versions and even manage the upgrades for you. Run it overnight and you can rest assured that you’ll never miss .001 of upgrades again. Note that you’re still going to want to keep Software Update around to let you know about certain Apple updates AppFresh might miss.

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