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Vox Pop: What default settings would you change?
Merlin Mann | Aug 21 2007
As I am wont to do, I was thinking out loud on Twitter this morning.
I'm convinced that, for better or worse, a lot of computer-related habits come straight out of using the default settings. For example a stock Mail.app install checks your email every 5 minutes (I reset mine to 'Manual') and, without interdiction, Apple's mail program will also create all your new messages as "Rich Text" (Nuh uh. Mine? 'Plain Text'). And then, in some cases, even if you want to do things differently, you have to swim upstream to do so. In the case above, I can't set iCal or gCal's default to anything but 1 hour (any more than I can autoset multiple alarms1). God only knows what poor John Gruber would give to have Mail.app more easily let people quit top-posting. The Question to You:What default settings would you love to change in popular applications? Taken a step further, what excellent habits could be taught to users by looking at defaults as something beyond familiarity and day one ease-of-use? Could the aggressive use of smart or personalized defaults create a generation of short-meeting-makers and intersperse-responders? 68 Comments
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 One of the greatest improvements...Submitted by josh susser (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 6:24am.
One of the greatest improvements to user experience on the internet was when mail programs changed the default to reply only to sender, instead of the whole to/cc list. That solved a huge problem (inadvertently replying to all) very simply. Entourage has the worst default settings I've ever seen. I'd change so many of them I don't have room to list here. But that brings up another issue: default defaults. When you create a new mail folder in Entourage, it always uses the same defaults for columns, etc. I'd like to be able to choose what the default settings are for a new folder, but Entourage stubbornly insists on doing things its own pigheaded way. Many other programs have the same issue, the Finder in particular. Please, let me choose my own defaults! » POSTED IN:
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