[SOLVED] Replace Stock OS X Apps with Google Apps

[guitarplyrstevo]

I've owned my Mid 2014 15" Macbook Pro for a little over 2 weeks now, and have loved everything about it. Switching over from a Windows based platform to an OS X platform has been nothing less than a great experience.

The only thing is I have an Android phone, and I rely heavily on Google services. I've noticed OS X has some stock applications in the dock like 'Photos', 'Notes', and 'iTunes'.

I would like to know if there is a way to replace 'OS X Photos' with 'Google Photos', 'OS X Notes' with 'Google Keep', and 'iTunes' with 'Google Play Music'.

For example: If I want to view my photos, I want to click an icon in the dock, and have Google Chrome launch and open www.photos.google.com . It would also be nice to have the icon display the Google Photos icon as well.

I have played around with the Chrome App Launcher, but it offers very limited flexibility and does not allow you to add Google Photos in the launcher.

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks in advance!

 

[hallux]

For Music, get the Google Play Music app. It has a menu bar icon that allows you to launch the Play Music site from there. It sounds like you want the old Picasa app. (http://picasa.google.com) I'm not sure how the Picasa app works with the current iteration of the Photos page/setup.

Keep, that's more of a challenge.

 

[guitarplyrstevo]

For Music, get the Google Play Music app. It has a menu bar icon that allows you to launch the Play Music site from there. It sounds like you want the old Picasa app. (http://picasa.google.com) I'm not sure how the Picasa app works with the current iteration of the Photos page/setup.

Keep, that's more of a challenge.

I just downloaded and tried Picasa. It looks like it has the ability to upload photos to Google Photos, but it does not view photos like the Google Photos web interface does. Also, it does not look optimized to be used with a higher resolution display because the entire application looks extremely pixelated for some strange reason.

I just found this: Create application shortcuts for your favourite webpages

I think this is exactly what I am looking for, however I do not see this option in my Chrome browser (Chrome is up to date).

Any suggestions?

 

[guitarplyrstevo]

I figured it out.

This option is available, but it needs to be enabled within Google Chrome. To do this, use the following steps:

1) Open Google Chrome
2) Type chrome://flags/ in the address bar
3) Find Enable the new bookmark app system using command + F
4) Change Default to Enabled
5) Click the Relaunch Now button at the bottom of the Chrome browser
6) Navigate to the website you wish to create a desktop shortcut for
7) Click the 3 horizontal bars on the top left of the Chrome browser
8) Click More Tools then Add to Applications... and the rest is self explanatory.

Now I can directly swap OS X applications with Google applications.

I've noticed it doesn't always get the correct desktop icons. To fix this, use the following steps:

1) Right click and press Copy image on a correct high resolution picture from the internet
2) Right click the application with the incorrect icon from Finder
3) Click Get Info
4) Left click the incorrect icon in the top left
5) Press command + v
6) Remove shortcut from dock and replace to get the updated shortcut icon.

I hope this helps.