Hi,
I have a very tough question, so feel free to punch me for that one :)
What do we actually plan to do with Object Properties palette? It looks like it wasn't touched for ages.
Recently I had a talk with a newbie user and he told me that he expected seing there more properties, both "global" and "specific". In that particular case he couldn't figure out how to change amount of an already created polygon's sides and he expected to see that in Object Properties palette.
Then there was another feature request to make it possible choosing what properties of selected objects can be changed. E.g. in a selection of 25 objects you can have 12 objects which should not lose either fill or stroke or opacity or any specific for this type of objects property or any combination of the above, when you change it for the whole group. And as you know ;-) Inkscape, unlike Scribus, doesn't store changes per object within a session, so you can't aply changes to a group and then undo it for individual objects.
So the second part of the question is whether we can make a better use of the Object Properties palette.
In addition to what there already is in that palette we could add two groups of options:
1. Global options, i.e. Fill, Stroke, Opacity, Filters. 2. Specific options, i.e. the ones from tools options toolbar.
For selections with multiple objects of different types (e.g. 2 stars and 3 rectangles) specific options would be greyed out.
Each option would have a checkbox to allow/forbid changes to it, with 3 positions: yes, no, fuzzy (when at least two of the selected objects have different values, gtk supports it).
Am I daydreaming? :)
Alexandre