On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 21:06 -0400, Greg Steffensen wrote:
6.) When doing a search, the app goes non-responsive for long periods of time which is bad IMO.Definitely agree; this is an Inkscape issue, and after looking through the extensions code a bit, I suspect its a non-trivial fix. You could partially fix this by having the subprocess that Inkscape spawns for the extension spawn the real extension process and then return immediately, giving Inkscape back the unaltered document. You could then insert clip art by dragging and dropping, but not by selecting an image. The issue is that Inkscape effects extensions work by writing the current document to the extensions's standard input, waiting (freezing), then reading the modified document on standard input. To keep it responsive during the waiting period, you'd have to spawn another thread that would poll the extension continuously. This could be done by modifications to extension/implementation/script.cpp, but I haven't attempted this yet.
Well, this isn't really the way that effects are meant to be used. You're asking for a pallet, which honestly isn't available. In order to do multithreaded, we can't assume that anyone has a golden version of the document anymore. Palettes are on the roadmap, but until the DOM is available, I'm afraid that they are impractical. We could make the GUI refresh, but would have to force you to be unable to edit the document (which makes the GUI refreshing not that useful).
--Ted