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Vox Pop: What default settings would you change?

Submitted by Merlin on August 21, 2007 - 4:02am.

As I am wont to do, I was thinking out loud on Twitter this morning.

Twitter message: 'I wonder how different the world might look if the default 'new meeting' time in calendar programs were 10 minutes instead of 1 hour'

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?

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Wow, all the comments so...

Submitted by Doug (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 6:13am.

Wow, all the comments so far definitely are on my list.

I’m not a fan of Safari’s choice to open up the page you were last viewing when opening the browser later on. I believe this is the default, and it just doesn’t make sense in 90% of the sites I’m visiting before closing the browser. Dear Safari, I /already read/ that, I don’t want to see it again.