Changing Default Applications in Mac OSX
For the past couple months I’ve had Illustrator set as my default application for swf files. It’s really become a pain because anytime I double click on swf files OSX tries to open them with Illustrator. Then I have to wait for Illustrator to load only for it to tell me that the swf file is incompatible with Illustrator. I’ve got used to right-clicking (or control-clicking) the file to open it with Flash Player, but I finally got around to looking into how to update my default application settings in OSX.
First I found an application called RCDefaultApp which looked pretty cool, so I’m mentioning it here, but I didn’t want to install a separate program just to update my application settings.
How to Update Default Applications in OS X
Fortunately, it is really simple to do. Just find your file and then open up the ‘Get Info’ panel by either right-clicking or control-clicking and selecting Get Info from the context menu, or simply select the file and press Cmd+I. > Your info panel will show the default application for the file under the “Open with:” section. To update your default application just select the program from the drop down menu there. In my case I updated it to Flash Player, because I want swf files to open with Flash Player. Once you change the “Open with:” program it will update the files icon in Finder and on the info panel.
Remember that this only updates the default application for that single file. So, if you want to update the default application for every swf file, then you need to click on the Change All… button on the info panel, and it will confirm that you want to update every file of that type to use the new application. Just click the ‘Continue’ button from that dialog, and it will update every swf file on your machine to open with your selected default application.
Obviously it’s painfully simple, but not obvious where to find it, I was looking in my System Preferences for a while before I checked the info panel.
