Are you fed up with iTunes? Well when the installation for updates was getting to be about 70MB, I decided to find an alternative. Why make people download a 70MB file to apply an update your application? iTunes doesn't just have a large footprint, it is so slow! It shouldn't take five minutes to start up a media player and listen to your favorite album.

VLC is an amazing light-weight media player. It's pretty versatile and can handle most file types that you throw its way. I like it for its speed, though I would say that its decoders aren't the greatest. I've found much better quality with paid-for apps. But hey, for being free it's pretty powerful.

Gimp is an AWESOME image editing program. Though I'm sure I'm antagonizing a heated debate, Gimp is a sufficient alternative to Photoshop. So far I haven't come across a single feature that Photoshop has, that Gimp can't do, for free.