Oh, I certainly wish Apple would allow you to set third-party programs as defaults for integration. But unfortunately that's not my call. I just suck it up and manually launch the programs I want to use, because I like using them better.

Were this Windows, there would be a 3rd party app...err application... that would let you change the default launch app. Why not on OSX?

OS X lets you set default apps. I had Chrome set as my default browser for a while.

Try changing the app that launches when you press play/pause on the Mac keyboard. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Seems to drive Spotify on my OSX without me doing anything special... ?

Once it's running yes. But if you close Spotify, pressing the play key will start iTunes. It's quite infuriating.

Also try clicking a mailto link. I'm sure that about once a day I see the dialog asking me to add an account into the default mail app.

Basic integrations between MS Office apps also seem to be missing, I'll be damned if I can find the menu to send a copy of the document I'm working on in Word to a contact in outlook.

Mailto links open chrome with a gmail tab for me.

I just successfully changed it, but it was a janky experience. Until I added an account to the mail app, the preference used to change the default email reader remained greyed out because I was being prompted to add an email account. Only once I added a fake account did the preference option become available and let me change the default mailto handler. Removing the fake email account caused the preference to become greyed out (but it retained Outlook as the default).

Here's another example: Try and change the right click -> search with google menu option to 1) not open in Safari and 2) search using another search engine.

I did it this way by accident : I installed chrome and logged into gmail. Chrome asked me if I wanted to make gmail the default mail app and I said yes.

I would have NEVER discovered that this would be even possible any other way. I don't know if it works on other browsers but it's cool that it works.

On right click in chrome I have two "search with DuckDuckGo" options and one searches on a new tab and another on the same tab. I don't know why.

This kind of thing has actually improved over time, though. It used to be (back in 10.6, at least) that the play/pause buttons always affected iTunes, even if you had, say, VLC running. It would just also affect VLC.

Have you tried Bowtie or BeardedSpice?

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-users-heres-control-streami...

I use Bowtie for a few things, but haven't really tried it for this purpose as I pretty much just use iTunes as I have several decades worth of music I've bought in it.

http://bowtieapp.com

I just had to look down ... and yep there they are. I had no idea these were on my keyboard. Never used 'em.

For a long time, me neither. Didn't trust those weird "media keys" and indeed expected them to just pop up some default app I never use. Until I accidentally hit them on Linux and it turned out they do exactly what you'd expect. Now I use them all the time :) In particular the play/pause and volume buttons.

Check out Magic Keys https://www.gearmusicplayer.com/extras.html

Can do that with any number of keyboard macro apps.

If VLC is launched, then that's what starts playing.

And it even supports handoff from iOS Safari.

Is that just Safari with a Chrome chrome?

He's talking about OSX (desktop), where Chrome indeed is the Chrome you'd expect.

Of course... Thanks

In Windows you can change the setting quite easily using a first party settings dialog. Or were you talking about having a 3rd party application as an option in that dialog? Or the part where some applications let you associate the file type when you install the application, or in some cases the settings pages inside the application?

There's some confusion in the above posts. You can do all that easily in OS X (Apple's desktop OS). It's only iOS (the mobile one) that's locked down.

Android lets you do that as well. There are loads of third-party launchers for Android; one of my former coworkers made several million selling one of them to Yahoo.

Aviate was brilliant.

Until Yahoo turned it into a less intelligent Google Now wannabe anyway. Sigh...

it's more of an iOS thing, OS X is pretty customizable.

> If you want to develop software, then you are pretty much stuck with XCode

There are like nine different versions of Emacs for OS X...

I don't have any experience developing iOS or Cocoa applications, but I imagine that you need to use at least some of the XCode toolchain to make those things happen.

You need the compilers/toolchain from Xcode, but there are third-party build tools, such as e.g. Buck[1] that combined with an decent editor, let you pretty much avoid the Xcode GUI for a lot of the development cycle.

[1]https://buckbuild.com/

you said "a lot of the development cycle", as someone who hates Xcode I worry that won't be enough (not making anything requiring compilation on mac at moment, so not particularly worried)

If you don't use Interface Builder, you can actually avoid Xcode completely.

Everyone I ask says that using Emacs for ios development is impractical. If anyone knows different please share the details.

Well, if you're willing to buy RubyMotion:

http://www.rubymotion.com/

I made an iOS app using vim and Lua (via wax - https://github.com/alibaba/wax). Obviously needed the xcode toolchain for compilation and libraries but always from the CLI / scripts.

Getting the code building with M-x compile should be fairly straightforward.

For deployment + debugging, you could try this: https://github.com/phonegap/ios-deploy

Looks like it runs lldb itself, but perhaps with a bit of work you could get it to interact with gud-mode?

But no software even close to Visual Studio, that's the point.

what?

jetbrains.com (intellij, appcode, pycharm,webstorm, rubymine etc)

sublime text atom vim emacs eclipse

Not even close to Visual Studio on Windows, that's the point (I know I'm repeating, but it's sad that I'm having to do that).

Intellij eats Visual Studio for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Twice. Every day.

To make VS somewhat usable, you need Resharper - made by the company, that makes Intellij.

Intellij is amazing. Note that jetbrains built resharper to de-suckify Visual Studio. And many of the refactorings that we all take for granted were invented by Jetbrains.

Intellij is fairly close as an IDE to Visual Studio on Windows. It's sad you are not seeing it.

And that without mentioning ReSharper which enhances VS quite a bit.

Quite a few people would respond to that by saying:

> There are like nine different versions of Emacs for OS X...

Is there anyone preventing anyone from making something 'close to Visual Studio' though?

I don't think Apple is blocking that. If you're looking for something for iOS/Mac dev, all the build tools are available as command-line interfaces.

No one is stopping 'in theory', but may be because there's no IDE close enough to Visual Studio for making something close enough to Visual Studio stopping people? ;)

Tried to buy a Visual Studio license for porting our game to Windows Phone last year. Ended up paying $2K for a version that was able to build WP apps, but not allowed to release them.

VS + VA used to be fantastic, today it's just a piece of ... overpriced crap.

But maybe expecting more from $2K+ software (VS) than from FREE software (xcode) is wrong.

Not sure what you are talking about. Visual Studio Express allows Windows phone development for free. Of course, for releasing they charge money (much lesser than what Apple charges).

No, you're not locked in to using the default Mail app anymore. Since iOS 8, mail app developers can write a share sheet extension and you can access their mailer wherever you can access system share sheets.

And you're not really stuck with Xcode anymore than you're stuck with Visual Studio on Windows. You can use the command line tools to do everything yourself, it's just more difficult. You can also obviously write apps in Java or even Electron, which is very popular these days.

As for Siri not using your custom music player, that's unfortunate. But integration often comes at the cost of extensibility, and while Apple has the former nailed, they are still clearly working on the latter.

There are plenty alternatives to XCode. AppCode is one high quality one. Setting up your own custom llvm toolchain is also an option.

Note that iOS and OS X are very different systems. On OS X, you can replace everything with your preferred software just as easily as you could in Windows or Linux.

> If you want to develop software, then you are pretty much stuck with XCode.

GNU/Linux and *BSD are probably the only OSes where there is no such thing as an OS vendor SDK.

Clicking on an address defaults to fucking Apple Maps... Let me say that again: Apple Maps...

Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves. These days it is better than Google Maps, in my opinion: Better map pins, better graphical performance, better rendering style, better search.

Someone clearly lives in the US... Probably in the Bay Area.

edit: just tested Apple Maps with a couple searches I did in Google Maps yesterday. Searched for the carrier shops for the two biggest carriers in my country. First search took me to Australia. The other ones found nothing in my city (there are probably at least 10-20 of each carrier in this town) and zoomed out to country level. Still completely and utterly useless.

That said, I'm no big Google Maps fan either, they have a lot of data issues as well. I tend to use a local app which works much better for public transit and car navigation, and has a nice category drill-down for POIs which works around a lot of the issues with free-text search

According to this article http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-ios/ Apples maps is used by Apple iPhone users more then Google Maps. So it's hard to believe it's as bad as you claim.

Hardly surprising, given it's installed by default. And that clicking on an address (say, on a website or a text message) leads up Apple's Maps by default.

It's not hard to believe user preferences can be different from the market share of pre installed applications (i.e., I.E.).

Apple Maps over Google Maps on a phone every time for me, and I live in Norway, not in the US.

iOS makes it intentionally much easier to just use Apple Maps and deal with the badness than to use another map App.

> Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves

I haven't used it since launch, so can't comment on its current performance, but AFAICT its reputation is due to how poor it was at launch. I tried it with three locations that Google Maps handled fine (small sample I know, but enough to put me off trying it further), and had problems with all three results (my house: low-res satellite imagery; my College: wrong website address; Cambridge Union Society: correct details, but location was about 50mi out).

Hopefully its now better, but that initial impression is hard to shake.

Edit: initially -> initial

It's not that hard to shake your initial impression, actually. It's called actually using the product at any time in the last 3 years, for 10 minutes or so. Try it. You might be surprised.

Yes, that's what I was referring to — the launch was terrible, but it has now been improved to the point were it's surpassed Google Maps in usability. I use it every day on my phone.

Apple Maps, in many ways, is more usable than Google Maps when it comes to directions / heads up on turns and such. Unfortunately, it's still missing a glaring feature for me where I can't get it to ignore toll roads or highways when calculating directions. Even if I manually jigger it to avoid the road I want to avoid, it still "corrects" and tries to send me on that road.

They need to get some more of the driving GPS features figured out and I'll switch over entirely.

I agree that Apple Maps is currently better, but I attribute that mostly to the quality of Google Maps severely degrading in recent years.

It has gotten so bad, that I've dusted off my old stand-alone GPS and keep it in my car's center console. Google Maps no longer has reliability that I can count on for a road trip.

"I attribute that mostly to the quality of Google Maps severely degrading in recent years."

Seriously? I can't see how that would happen unless you're living somewhere prone to dramatic road rebuilding. Or do you mean the quality of the Google Maps interface?

The interface and apps. Accurate maps aren't worth a damn, without a reliable way of accessing them.

FWIW for Berlin, Apple Maps draws the transport lines and stations far better and nicer. Google draws the lines very imprecisely and doesn't show you tram lines, for example.

In my city, Google Maps has NO transit, NO satellite images since 2004, NO map data since 2010. Here maps has satellite and transit, and Apple Maps even has full 3D buildings.

Following is a set of complaints I compiled last year when a Google employee asked me on reddit to post them more detail about my maps complaints.

The usability of any Google product outside the US is a total disaster, and it’s a wonder how Google is able to keep any market share with their quality of service.

NONE of this has been addressed since we started complaining in 2005 (!), except for one thing: that connection between two streets, which is closed with a fence, has been marked as closed. So now we have less people standing there trying to get through.

> https://www.google.com/maps/@54.3559928,10.0734304,18z

> http://imgur.com/a/DyRBT

> The map data on top is from the municipality, the map data on bottom from Google.

> As you see, the street "Beim Bauernhaus" is completely missing, the "Kellerkate" is missing half the street, the connection between "Beim Bauernhaus" and "Kellerkate" is missing, the "Kl. Koppel" is missing parts of the street.

> You currently have data from 2010 for this specific area.

> The data you currently have access to from GeoBasis-DE is this: http://i.imgur.com/67TQeP8.png

> At least the connection between Steinberg and Nienbrügger Weg is now marked as service path, until recently it was marked as street and people tried to get through there (there’s a fence making that impossible).

> I won’t get too much into satellite data either, because yours is from 2004, too:

> https://www.google.com/maps/@54.3530178,10.0703569,529m/data...

> https://www.here.com/?map=54.35308,10.07028,17,satellite

> And the unavailability of Public Transit data for busses, etc. on Google Maps – which is available on Here.com – makes it unlikely that I, as a student using public transit all the time – am going to switch back.

TBH you can blame that on Germany alienating Google Maps

https://gigaom.com/2014/12/05/googles-cars-return-to-german-...

"Google started automatically blurring faces and number plates, it was forced to give Germans the option of having their houses blurred out as well – something hundreds of thousands of people took the firm up on.

However, this was a costly business, with Google needing to hire temporary workers to manually blur out selected buildings. It also didn’t stop people trying to sue the U.S. company over alleged privacy infringement. So, in 2011, Google said it was giving up on Street View in Germany – the pre-existing images remain online, but they haven’t been updated in three years."

This only affects Street View which Google has abandonded in Germany.

I know that google uses street view to determine street addresses by OCRing the numbers on the side of houses. Maybe even more of their mapping relies on it?

That concerns street view.

But Google has bought access to the government map data (GeoBasis-DE for Germany, I posted a screenshot of what GeoBasis-DE shows for the area above).

Google has bought the mapdata, can use it, but doesn't.

Conversely, Apple Maps still has no transit in Tokyo, rendering it completely unusable in one of the iPhone's largest markets.

So don't extrapolate your city to the rest of the world.

Conversely, Google Maps is lame for transit everywhere in the world, whereas at least Apple Maps is making rapid progress here.

I visited a dozen+ countries in 4 continents last year - GMaps did a pretty decent (often great) job with public transit. In the cases where there was no/bad data, it usually had more to do with the transit authorities being jackasses than anything in Google's control (Melbourne in particular stuck out as being just terrible).

Well, that doesn't solve the question with the cities where here.com and bing maps have full transit data, and where the data is available via simple REST APIs, but where Google still doesn't have data.

BTW, the Android-App "Öffi" has full support for Melbourne, as Melbourne provides a simple to use API, and has for the past years.

After neither GMaps nor CityMapper having transit for Melbourne I just gave up and stood at the stop. :(

Yeah, I couldn't believe how bad it was, especially since Sydney has been fine for years. Apparently the root of this was their transit agency's longtime refusal to open up their data: http://m.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/melbourne-pub...

Some data was finally released last April (promised as part of an election reform campaign), but as of October there were still GMaps integration issues: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/victorian-g...

I was involved in a lot of (too many) geo/transit/open data conversations in the late 2000s, and sadly, this kind of short-sighted/nonsensical thinking was all too common, and I'm sure persists in many of the places where people lay the blame on GMaps, when it's actually due to stonewalling bureaucrats.

Just use Öffi, Öffi has support for almost every city globally, including Tokyo and Melbourne.

But the UI is ugly.

Essentially, Germany made it clear that they didn't want Street View. So Google took the hint.

Not defending the behaviour, but Apple Maps has vastly improved.

And? I use it on a daily basis and I have no problems with it whatsoever. Sure, some people had issues with it when it launched, but like anything else in tech, those issues were way overblown.

Apple Maps performs much worse for me on tmobile network in minneapolis. It takes me to wrong locations, locks up frequently, etc. I only use google maps now - much more stable and always takes me to the right place.

You can always copy the email address with a long press or a force press.

I have a hard time taking anyone's opinion seriously about Xcode when they spell it with a capital 'c'. ;)