Superior Alternatives to Crappy Apple OS X Application Software

Lifehacker’s Thorin Klosowski articulates something that has been my general, politically incorrect impression now for nearly 20 years of Mac usership; I love the Mac OS, but Apple’s productivity and utility software, much of it which comes bundled with OS X and is no hardship to have available, tends to be ho-hum mediocre at best. As Thorin observes, while most of these applications are at least passable, they typically lack the feature sets power users need, designed to be easy to use for beginners, but the second you want to do something more complex or challenging with them, you’re out of luck.

Consequently, aside from some utilitarian use of TextEdit, which is decent, and Preview, which is better than decent, my entire suite of production applications and Web browsers is pretty much third-party, and has been since the beginning. Even the erstwhile AppleWorks, which many Mac users genuinely loved, always seemed to me to be second-rate and frustrating to use compared with leaner, nimbler, and slicker third-party software. Back in the day, I bought a copy of Apple’s old MacWrite II word processor, but found it sluggish, numb and clunky compared with the contemporary Microsoft Word 5.1 or Nisus Writer. That remains my impression with Apple’s current iWork Pages word processor compared with even Cloud-based Google Docs or LibreOffice.

Lifehacker’s editors have compiled a list of their favorite replacements for the usually workable, but generally boring OS X default software, some examples being:

Application to Avoid: iTunes
Superior Alternative(s): Enqueue, Songbird, Spotify

Application to Avoid: Safari
Superior Alternative(s): Chrome, Firefox

Application to Avoid: iPhoto
Superior Alternative(s): Lyn, Picasa

Application to Avoid: iWork
Superior Alternative(s): NeoOffice, Google Docs

Application to Avoid: Quicktime
Superior Alternative(s): VLC, MPlayerX, Perian

And so forth.

You can check it out at:
http://lifehac.kr/uzXj5W