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Vox Pop: What default settings would you change?

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?

Jesse Janowiak's picture

In gCal, I'd like to...

In gCal, I'd like to be able to change the default start and end times for my day. I'd like to be able to change the number of hours displayed onscreen by default -- or at all, for that matter!

Motorola's RAZR address book (I believe it's the same for all of their phones) should default to "list by name" instead of the bizarre and cumbersome "list by picture". Listing by picture only works if you have pictures for a majority of your address book entries, and even then it doesn't allow you to assign two numbers to one person in that view.

Word should be set to delete double-spaces after periods by default.

 
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