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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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 Two email features: Once more than...Submitted by Philip Sternberg (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 8:17am.
Two email features: Once more than five recipients are in the TO or CC field, move them to BCC unless the user takes action. In fact, many email clients go out of their way to hide BCC, so lots of folks don't even know it's there until someone educates them. We've all gotten those 2 megabyte photo attachments from well-meaning relatives who want to share their harvest festival celebration with the whole family. Of course, the better behavior is to post it on the web and send a pointer, or shrink it down. Some email clients do something like this automatically, but there's a lot of room for improvement here with default behavior. » POSTED IN:
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