By Russell Harris.
Lion’s new iCal App has a great new interface, but new Events still have a
default duration set to 1 hour. I find that I set many events to half an hour, so can I make this the default?
Well, i’m sorry to say that the interface wont let you do this, so we’re off into the command line if you dare follow me!
If you open the ‘Terminal’ Application from inside /Applications/Utilities, and enter, (or you can copy and paste), the following :
defaults write com.apple.iCal 'Default duration in minutes for new event' 30
(The ’30’ at the end is the duration in minutes, so you can tailor this to your own needs).