Still on the topic of having the dynamic properties separate from the tiling tool:
Jasper:
One of the things that would make interpolation work really well with tiled clones is that they are conceptually laid out in a grid, so it is clearly defined how many "steps" there are between two objects
I think of the "dynamic options" more as "discrete options" - using the columns and rows you bucket the objects into cells and apply an interpolated value for the whole cell. Using that idea, I think you could apply the discrete options to any selection of objects by superimposing a grid.
Here is a diagram to show what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/eL85r.png
With the grid you can be very flexible, it doesn't have to be Cartesian - you can change the spacing of the grid (in one dimension or both), change the orientation, skew it, rotate it, choose something other than a rectangular grid such as a polar grid or a grid with exponential spacing. One day you could even allow fancy editing of the grid to create custom distortions.
An object is assigned the value corresponding to the cell it overlaps with most. If the object completely covers multiple cells, it is assigned a value based on the average of the underlying cells (I think the current cloned tile tracing behaviour does something like this and could be used as the model).
Jasper:
Also, for blur it is quite essential that discrete objects have a single blur value, as SVG does not support "spatially-varying" blur (and it is non-trivial to do support it).
And in a later post:
Jasper:
I've been thinking about this, and I think the most natural method would probably be to act more or less like a gradient does, so the start tile would be the first stop, and the reference tile the last.
You have stated it better than I did. This is what I meant by it would be great if blur could be applied in a way similar to gradient. Yes it is discrete but it would be nice to set a start and stop value and let the blur values in between be interpolated and applied in a step wise fashion. In my diagram the line with the circle and square end points is meant to represent the start and stop value like the gradient tool. Allowing multiple changes (like the gradient tool) would be awesome too.
I think these discrete options could appear mixed in with the existing alignment, fill etc dialogs. Or the could be turned into a dialog of their own but to me that would make them harder to discover.
Veronika