If you are new to Mac, then you would surely find using it an hefty task during the initial days. But as days go by, you realize that things that Mac lets you do were never possible on any other operating system.
When I was new to Mac, there were many issues which I used to face in respect of using it. One of them was my attempt to set default applications on Mac OS X.
It is quite annoying to right click on the file, choose the program you want to use and open it the same way every time you want to. So how about setting that applications as the default application for all such files.
Isn’t it a good idea to tell your Mac that you want to use a different default application, not the one it offers you with. For example, I am huge VLC Player fan. And I find it annoying to open my movies, by doing Open With VLC Player every time I want to watch one.
So, how about telling your Mac that this is not what you want and set default applications on Mac OS X the way you want? Sounds good, right? Here are a couple of ways.
2 Ways To Set Default Applications On Mac OS X
Method 1 – Set Default Applications On Mac OS X
This is an easy way, but surely is a little bit time consuming one. I will take the above example of VLC Player to demonstrate this method. In this method, we would be telling Mac that instead of using Quick Time player, you want VLC Player to be used as default media player.
- Right click on the any of the media file and click on Get Info button
- Now, there click on the drop down menu in the Open With section and choose the VLC Player
- And then click on the Change All button
That is it! This will set the default application of all the files with same file extension on your Mac to VLC Player. Like, if you have done this for a .mov file, then the default application for all the .mov files on your Mac has been set as VLC Player.
Method 2 – Set Default Applications On Mac OS X
They say that the choice is yours. Regardless the reason, if you do not want to try the above method, here is another one. In this method, we would be using a third party application named RCDefaultApp by RubiCode to get your job done.
Once you install the above mentioned on your Mac, we are good to go with it. With its amazing user friendly interface, you can easily set Mac default applications like default browser, default mail client, default media player, default text editor and any default Mac application you want.
Using this app, you can do what you did in the above method. And there are two ways to do it. One is to choose the application and set the default file extensions for it. And the other one is choose a file extension and set a default application to it. You can use + and – buttons to add and remove the items.
You can go with either of the methods and make your work more quicker. Yes, setting default applications helps and if you follow the above methods, you can get it done with so much of ease.
Install a program to set a program as default ?!
Funny how much simpler it is to do this on a PC.
Intuitive indeed.