We have areal mess in our assorted and various preference and look settings. Does anyone even know how many places there are where choices can be made? 

The PreferencesBrowser has a *lot* of preferences in it. Lots of stuff I have no idea how to make use of or why they are there - I mean really, do we have even the faintest use for ‘thoroughSenders’ any more? Let alone ‘ThoroughSenders’, which is a separate preference in the browser that appears to link to the same message, sort of.

It also has a bunch of colour settings, split up in strange places. But no screen background setting that I can see. Nor font choosing.

We *do* have the ‘appearances’ item in the Screen menu, with a separate collection of oddness. And then other bits scattered in many other places within the poorly designed tree of menus depending from the screen menu. But not of course actual tree menus, oh no, submenus activated by ‘more…’ and so on. It’s really not very encouraging.

My suggestion(s) - 
clean out the preferences
reorganise the preference groupings more helpfully
add decent look preference tools - backgrounds, fonts, sizes, etc
clean out the weird screen menu tree
convert menus to ‘proper’ hierarchical menus wherever a long menu could do with shortening or there are logical groups of items (for example the save/quit group)

It’s quite a bit of work though.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.