In talking with Aaron a while back he mentioned that sometimes it is hard to come up with ideas for good effects. I was thinking about it, and I'm willing to bet that the user community has some good ideas. This isn't a call for "features" (i.e. layer dialog) more like quick little things that you can already do in Inkscape, but it takes a few steps. You do it often enough that it would be really cool to have a "one click" way to do it.
Typically something that takes 5-10 steps is good (too few it isn't worth doing, too many, it may be too complex). Try to include a description of the idea, how you could do it in Inkscape today, and what kind of application you have in mind for it. Including how to do it in Inkscape today helps new users learn techniques, even if they never get made into effects -- so make sure to be clear for them! I've included a few that have been bouncing around in my head below.
If anyone wants to implement any of these, ask for help on -devel. We'd be happy to help and get you started on your way.
--Ted
-- Zealous crop --
Many times when I'm drawing something for a website I draw it, and then I want the document size to be the same as what I drew. This can be done by selecting all the objects, looking at the size of the bounding box, and then adjusting the document properties appropriately. The size of the bounding box is shown in the secondary toolbar when selecting objects. But, it would be really cool to just click "Crop to drawing" and have this happen for me.
-- Desaturate --
Sometimes I think that I'd like to see the image I'm working on in black and white (or, more correctly, greyscale). It would be cool if there was one command to change all the fill, stroke, and gradient colors to be totally desaturated. Realistically, it should be every selected object, so that I can make a rose that is in color stand out on a desaturated background. (Note: one tricky part here is that you need to watch for shared objects that are used more than once. If a gradient is used twice, and only one of those shapes is desaturated, a second gradient will need to be created)
-- Align by font size --
I haven't decided whether I like this effect or not, but it seems to be popular. Basically people seem to be taking a block of text, and to make it align on the left and right sides, they adjust the size of the font for that line. So the text:
I love elephants
might have the font sizes of 36, 24, and 10 for each word respectively. (I didn't do the math, I'm just trying to make an example, don't go and see if those are the right sizes). To do this in Inkscape today you'd have to manually adjust the font sizes until it looked good, which can take a while.