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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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 What if email apps reordered...Submitted by Joe (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 7:11am.
What if email apps reordered their interface so that you would write a message and subject first, then attached stuff you needed, then email addresses. That way, you wouldn't forget to attach stuff or accidentally send blank messages? What if there was a default to limit emails to 5 sentences? What if the power button on phones wasn't in the place you least expected it to be? Is it so hard to write software to turn on my phone with the green button and off with the red? Does that even translate to other cultures around the world? What if you didn't get the option to use email folders by default? All you had was searching and a big archive, maybe some special smart folders. » POSTED IN:
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