The
recent thread by johnny5 got me thinking about the default settings in Mac OS X and Apple's apps and just how much I really
dislike them. I usually spend a good ten or fifteen minutes going through everything and changing them. Thank goodness for preferences!
So, I was wondering what were the things that you all change immediately upon setting up a new Mac or a new account on an existing Mac. Off the top of my head, here are the first things that I change to make my Mac work efficiently:
- Dock/Exposé:
- Hide the Dock.
- Pin the Dock to the end and enable transparent icons for hidden apps.
- Get rid of the iLife and Dashboard icons from the Dock; add QuickTime Player, TextEdit, and SubEthaEdit.
- Set "application windows" to top left, "all windows" to top right, "desktop" to bottom right, and "Dashboard" to bottom left corner. Set "all windows" to mouse button 5 and "desktop" to mouse button 4.
- Finder:
- Turn on snap to grid for the desktop.
- Turn on "keep arranged by name" as the default.
- Give the hard drive a custom name and icon.
- TextEdit:
- Set "Ignore rich text commands in HTML files" in TextEdit.
- New document format: plain text.
- Enable spell checking.
- Safari:
- Enable status bar.
- Enable tab browsing, always show tab bar, don't select as created.
- Disable all autofill.
- New windows open with blank page.
- Remove the hordes of useless bookmarks.
- Enable spell checking.
- Mail:
- Use MailStamps to replace those hideous icons with the better ones (better for shape and color recognition, better for clickable area, better for UI consistency) from 10.3.
- Others:
- Enable Universal Access zoom.
- Set key repeat to maximum and delay to minimum.
- Set mouse and trackpad speed to highest.
- Set full keyboard access to "all controls."
- Show seconds and flash time separators for clock.
- Disable "play feedback when volume is changed."
- Disable Spotlight keyboard shortcuts.
Sheesh! I must be an outlier, completely outside of Apple's main demographic. Default settings are
supposed to be the best combination of useful and most likely preferences that users would use. After all, a significant portion of users will never change them.
Is it just me? Or does Apple really just have a bad set of default preferences?