Have you ever been a regular at a coffee shop? The barista knows you by name, and every morning when you come by, she’s already got your Triple Non-Fat Sugar-Free Vanilla Latte waiting for you. That’s an intelligent default. She doesn’t know for sure that’s what you want, or even that you’ll come in today, but you’ve ordered it enough times before that she’s confident making it.
Well-written software can have intelligent defaults, too, and you can give your users that same feeling of anticipating their needs. Here are a few examples of programs that found a clever way to save their users’ time with common, repetitive tasks. Continue reading

