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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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 In gCal, I'd like to...Submitted by Jesse Janowiak (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 10:30am.
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. » POSTED IN:
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