Hello people,
On behalf of your Chinese users I'd like to ask to make sure there are multiple channels to download the new Inkscape versions as bittorrents are blocked by at least two ISP's here. Anything remotely social gets blocked in this socialism the Chinese way state. I agree that the new release will get quite some attention as it has been ages since the last major release and Inkscape is well known as one of the FOSS must haves. In case of 0.91 it will also gets known very fast there are important perks such as the greater speed of operation and a plethora of other improvements and new tools. So we can expect a lot of downloads in the first two months and then a gradual decrease in intensity. I do however expect an increase overall as 0.91 is greatly more productive tool than 0.48 and Inkscape has become more useful as a serious replacement for other tools.
For the roadmap I would like to ask how feasible it would be to add javascript and SMIL to the renderer? There was a javascript plugin for 0.48 that I never managed to get to work. The instructions were in Portugese, but the idea of being able to use javascript sure was a good one. Add SMIL to it and you're all set for development of animation tools.
On the GUI side, I would like to ask how possible it would be to have the GUI be constructed with SVG objects. That would allow enthusiasts to radically revamp the GUI and make specialised versions with limited tool sets for special tasks (think of Inkscape for kids) or change the GUI depending on tasks at hand (animation GUI, cutter GUI, etc.). If the Inkscape renderer would support javascript and SMIL it would open a whole world of web designers to use their skills to create slick GUI's that scale to whatever resolution in the future.
I personally use percentages in both SVG root and for objects. Currently it means using Notepad++ to create groups to position things percentage wise and changing sizes. The use case here is having a layout adopt to whatever resolution of the user and display objects you want with scaling backgrounds and positioning absolutely sized objects in the center of the page. It would be great if Inkscape would support that natively and the hassle of hand editing SVG code wouldn't be a necessity anymore.
I'm also quite exited by the idea that I won't have to contend with the dumb 90dpi or 96dpi setting, but can use whatever setting is my fancy. Having to work with 3.45xxx pixels per MM is really horrible. Setting that to 10 and just use a viewport would make my life a lot easier. Considering the new resolutions of screens for mobiles that go up 551 ppi these days, having 90 or 96 dpi defaults with lots of decimals to position something doesn't make much sense to me anyway. Having a higher dpi setting would allow for working with whole numbers in files and might also increase speed of rendering due to that I would imagine. Also nice for those working with print btw.
My two cents,
Jelle