Hi all,
When I have opportunities, I like to try out Inkscape for some of my freelance work and take notes. My freelance work is mostly doing artwork for those t-shirts you see in kiosks at the mall. Think "Coolest Grandpa in the World". A lot of tracing and finishing of scanned drawings. Anyway, I realized that I had a lot of notes from over several months and I thought I'd finally gather them together and send them to the list.
I love the MMB panning and zooming, especially now that I can MMB pan even while I am in the middle of drawing a path with the pen tool. Is there any reason that Shift+MMB+drag couldn't serve the same function as LMB+drag with the zoom tool (zooming in on the area you've just dragged a box around)? I think it would really complete the middle mouse button as a document navigation tool. Shift+MMB+drag currently just pans the document, the same as regular MMB dragging.
Dialogs pop-up to the front whenever I hover for more than a second over a toolbar button or menu. They appear to pop up simultaneously with the tooltips. This is under Win2k, It works correctly in Ubuntu.
Is there any way that the HSL color picker could be fixed so that changing the value of one component would not affect the values of the other components? For instance, setting S to 0 often snaps H to 0 also. Other, less drastic value changes occasionally occur too. It is frustrating to pick out the exact hue I want, only to have it change when I start tinkering with the saturation or lightness.
Align nodes is nice, but it would be more useful if there was an option to align to the center or average of the selected nodes.
I love the node editing tool, especially now that i can drag curve segments and double click to add nodes! I use Illustrator at work and at home for freelance jobs and I must say that the path editing UI is one area where I find Inkscape to be head and shoulders above AI. The only problem is the speed. Forgive me for mentioning it (since I know everyone is aware of the slow rendering), but more than any other drawback this is the one that can turn using Inkscape from a pleasure into a headache. I've brought this up before, and people mentioned profiling, but it is a little bit over my head. I don't know if it is still worth doing, but some instructions are available at http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Profiling for those who would like to try (maybe this page should be linked to the TestingInkscape page?).
Anyway, I hope these notes are helpful. -Mike