Thanks for the feedback!
First, if I've got a new session of inkscape, and i do file>open, why does it open it into a new window rather than the blank one I've got in front of me? every time it does it it strikes me as odd.
Yes, it's in the plans. Maybe next version.
Second up, have you considered making use of the boolean ops to add paintbrush/eraser tools ala flash? the functionality is all there just spread across several tools currently. The way I've been simulating it currently is to use the calligraphy tool to 'paint' an area, then whenever you paint additional areas immediately switch to select and ctrl++ it to the last section.
Not sure about usefulness of this. The vector approach is to keep things separate and at a high level of abstraction for as long as possible, and only merge/flatten/convert to paths as the last stage if possible. So if I need this functionality, I would actually prefer to have shapes separate to I can move and adjust them, and do a union or difference on them if necessary (but I think in many cases, just grouping them together would be convenient enough). On the other hand, what you propose may be simple enough to implement, but we need to do a paint tool with user-definable strokes first, otherwise the booleans are of little use IMHO.
Another feature that I'd love to see would be variable offsets, ie a dynamic offset with node weighting allowing the offset to be modified at each node so I could generate a line of varying thickness (like the calligraphy tool) but still editable by the basic centreline path. This would be a godsend for doing comic style drawings where the line weight is important. I know that ones a big task, just putting the idea out there.
Yes, useful, but perhaps more uesful in the short term and easier to implement is a variable-width stroke with some predefined shapes. I think our developers had some prototypes of this.
With regards to the 0.37 release, the builds i downloaded from Bobs site (which is really useful, both for builds and build instructions, cheers Bob) seemed to have problems with the keyboard shortcuts being messed up, the dialog ones were all muddled, (for instance Ctrl+Shift+M was opening fill/stroke) just checked the latest one there and its still the case.(zip file Inkscape0402120319.zip)
Very strange. Anyone else experiencing this?
What happened in the Fill/stroke dialog? the entry boxs for RGB values on the wheel tab are gone
That's temporary, we plan to restore them, although not RGB - the wheel is HSV and it will have HSV fields, if you need RGB switch to the RGB sliders.
as is the dropper icon, both of which were really useful.
Dropper on the dialog is redundant, you can use the dropper tool
(its a pain having to switch tool to do a dropper action,
What's the problem with the dropper? We discussed moving the dropper to the dialog and removing the tool, but then decided that the dropper will be very useful without the dialog, when we have a current color indicator and a palette.
btw, anyone got any suggestions as to the best place to get started with getting familiar with the code?
Read developer's howtos on Wiki - there's quite a lot of info there, although it's unorganized. Then look into the code and try to find what seems easiest - I don't know what it may be for you :) I started with adding new keyboard shortcuts, that was easy and fun, and gradually learned many parts of the codebase from there.
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