[chucker]

Originally Posted by Brad Dock/Exposé: Hide the Dock.

Nope. Completely disables its notification mechanism. Whilst I use Growl, not all applications really work with that, and some (I'm talking about you, Skype) don't implement it to the extent I would want. So I still rely on Dock badges.

Pin the Dock to the end and enable transparent icons for hidden apps.

I put it on the right side. Gives me more space.

As for hidden apps: not a solution for me, since the same level of transparency is used for dragging. I wish the Dock had a smarter indicator for this.

Get rid of the iLife and Dashboard icons from the Dock; add QuickTime Player, TextEdit, and SubEthaEdit.

Similar. iTunes remains, though. My current Dock: Finder, Safari, Shiira, Firefox, Camino, NetNewsWire, Adium, Skype, Colloquy, iTunes, Pages, Excel (damn you, Brad! ), TextEdit, SubEthaEdit, System Preferences, Terminal, HardwareGrowler, Activity Monitor, Console, Virtual PC (yuck!). I have Applications in my Dock and occasionally various minimized windows, such as the main window of NetNewsWire or that of iTunes.

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.

I haven't found screen corners to be effective for me on my iBook's trackpad, so I use function keys instead. Dashboard gets reassigned to F8, as F12 stupidly does not work. (How the fuck could they not have fixed this?)

Dashboard gets filled with Calculator, Calendar, Converter, two Weather widgets (Montral and Bremen), a SlothCam webcam image of a friend and finally Package Tracker.

Finder: Turn on snap to grid for the desktop. Turn on "keep arranged by name" as the default.

I use "keep arranged by date created" on the Desktop, which utterly totally fails to work the way I intend it to.

For icon view in windows, which I hardly use, I set 48x48 like on the Desktop and "keep arranged by name" just like you.

Both Desktop and windows' icon view have item info and icon preview on.

For column view -- my typical mode -- I occasionally turn the preview off, as it tends to fuck up with certain porn err media files (damn you, archaic QuickTime implementation and lack of codecs).

At that point, I cringe over the stupid brushed metal and try and think of a proper solution. Failing that, I either install Unifier (shudder, APE) or UNO (shudder, a theme).

Give the hard drive a custom name and icon.

I sometimes use a custom name, no, scratch that, I almost always do. I don't, however, really change icons around much at all.

TextEdit: Set "Ignore rich text commands in HTML files" in TextEdit. New document format: plain text. Enable spell checking.

Spell-checking, yeah, I enable it wherever I can. The others, no, I don't use TextEdit enough for that.

Safari: Enable status bar. Enable tab browsing, always show tab bar, don't select as created.

Yes.

Disable all autofill.

No, I enable them all (including passwords). Keychain is king.

New windows open with blank page. Remove the hordes of useless bookmarks. Enable spell checking.

Yes!

Mail:

No.

As in, the thing is too damn slow and buggy for me to be of any use. Shockingly enough, I have resorted (for this year) to just screw it and use GMail instead. Ugh. Yuck. Darn. I want to switch back to a desktop application, but there just isn't anything decent.

The solution? Avoid e-mail altogether as much as possible. It sucks so badly anyway.

Others: Enable Universal Access zoom.

Yes.

Set key repeat to maximum and delay to minimum. Set mouse and trackpad speed to highest.

No.

Set full keyboard access to "all controls."

Yes.

Show seconds and flash time separators for clock.

I used to. Now, there's just too little space... I really need a bigger-than-1024x768-internal-resolution Mac.

Disable "play feedback when volume is changed." Disable Spotlight keyboard shortcuts.

No.

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?

I disagree. You and I are both rather high-end, anal, pedantic and high-end Mac users. Hardly the "main demographic". I find their default settings to be fairly good, especially compared to the extreme mess that is Windows' default settings.