> I'm not sure that it makes sense to have the transformations symmetrical
> around the base tile.

The reason is because it's easy to just extend the frame in just one
direction, but a pain to have to have to make identical handles in
all directions. It's for designs where the user wants something to
fade in all directions, for example.

... tiling of gradients? D:

> As for the interface for actually adjusting the transforms (as well
> as opacity and such). Is it necessary to do it with "tiles" shown
> on screen, or would it suffice to allow transforming actual tiled
> clones?

Hm... actually, live preview of just the tiles could work? In that
case, the handle will have to be the tiles themselves. (option 1
of my three suggestions).

You have a point about jitters. I don't think small amount of jitters
would affect things much, but it's true that some users may want to
make larger amounts of jitters.

> In general, I think the system is very interesting, but I would be
> interested in making it a bit "leaner". After all, someone has to
> implement it, and (more importantly), a lot of someone's have to learn
> it. So the more we can leverage existing tools/infrastructure/concepts,
> the better.

True. Adding handles and having the transformation fan out in all
directions are also features not allowed by the current interface,
but that doesn't mean I can't leave them in there as features that
could be implemented eventually.

I do plan to decompose this into smaller tasks once everyone agrees on
the general interface. For example, the bare-bones version of this
feature would only feature normal clones (no fuse mode) with wallpaper
tiling (no radial, no lines). Instead of on-canvas dynamics control, users
just click on defined target tiles to pop-up a modified version of the
current interface, and input values manually. etc.

To be honest, I'm not even completely sure how Inkscape's current
interface works. That's why I started a re-design. Once you've looked
into the current design, it'd be helpful if you could tell us what's actually
going on...