plain pixl

Estimated reading time: 2.0 minutes, 25.0 seconds, containing: 476 words

I love it when program installers are honest. Honest in giving you a choice, in letting you know in bold red letters that the program that you install wants to change your browsers default engine, or add another useless Toolbar to your browsers, or offering a free trial or download of another program from the same author.

I hate the installers that hide the customize button, give you the one click install option, that installs everything without you being worried about anything, until you find out how much crap came along with that easy installer. Default settings might never be the good way to install any program, because most of the time any user should feel like a power user where they want to control what's being installed on their computer and whether they need any extra things except what he intended to install.

Provide sensible defaults or give user clear warning messages

I got burned on one of these default settings, on yahoo messenger where the programs decided to only keep the archive of your conversation until you logout. There are other ugly defaults that I usually change but this was something that I wasn't aware of and that made the most trouble to me when I needed to look at a previous conversation I had with somebody only to find out that the program already erased it, and even thou I kind of understand the security issues, and the amount of space that these logs would take after a while, I still think that some warnings should have been provided to me at the install wizard or after I've logged in.

Things to learn out of this experience

• For starters, never trust the default settings of any program, because a persons default can be a pain in the neck for another individual.
• Second of all, to encourage developers to allow users as much customization to the program as possible in relationship to the skin, color, saving or deleting mechanism, sound alerts, Internet usage ... and lots of other little features that many times we take for granted in some favorite programs that we use.

I hope that I have convinced you out there as well, for the next time that you install a program, to take that little extra time to look of the configuration settings because you might be surprised of the features that you can enable and are not enabled by default or the opposite ... or finding some features that you couldn't possibly understand why they are enabled or even present even in some programs that you've used for years and that you think you know about 100%, only to find out that a new version came out which changed some defaults from the previous versions without you knowing and then suffering out of your trust for the way things worked.