Hi! I'm Jan Darowski, form Poland, studying IT at the Warsaw University. Launchpad, IRC nick Slagvi. As for now I've developed few apps (mainly with Qt), but couldn't find a nice way to get into open source development (although I use it all the time). And here appears GSoC. I chose Inkscape because I often see many cool, free projects, which have even better functionality than commercial ones but for some reason they aren't as popular. I think that it's caused by less friendly, simple interface. I'm attending an Inkscape Internet course on my university and find it really nice and interesting project, which in many places can be improved. Later on I saw, that there's a very strong, active community what I find very important.
I chose to implement an old New From Template idea, as it looks like something improving reception of inkscape (especially for the new and very advanced users). It is also a well documented and described idea, so I believe that not only I find it important. Of course I already did required two patches, trying to choose these related with the subject. I already have some ideas/plans how to implement this idea but first I want to know if there aren't any more suggestions from the other developers.
And here are the the questions for you guys: 1. Is it still as important idea as I think? Maybe there is something more urgent what you can suggest to me? 2. As the ideas blueprint suggests ( https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/new-from-3. template-dialog) there has been some work done about this idea but I cannot find anything about what has been done and where it is. 3. Is there any support for the procedural templates written? That's another mentioned functionality I cannot find. Is it so important? Without very deep research in this direction I think It can require a lot of work to do it from the beginning. Maybe even to much as for the GSoC, as there are also other things to be done during this period.
As for now, I'm thinking about focusing on making a simple dialog, which covers current functionality + searching by tags + categorizing templates (things from wiki http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/NewFromTemplateSpec). As there will be a nice "New From Template" dialog, maybe I should also add one for creating templates? It shouldn't be very difficult, just another type of save dialog, with some additional template-specific fields and adding them into svg file.