I really like a lot of the changes I see in 0.46, like dialogs opening to the right instead of floating. And is the layers dialog new? If not I must have over looked it. I definitely like the new tweak brush.
But here is something that is really bugging me. In part I just made a stupid mistake, but also this is a really stupid behavior in inkscape.
I spent the last hour working on a drawing (and here is the really stupid part for me) without saving.
Then I turned up the blur a little. Well, I meant to turn it up a little. But I twitched, and apparently turned it up a lot. And now I see three things I would really like.
First, inkscape is pegging one of my CPUs (core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram). And it has been pegging this CPU for more then 10 minutes now.
Meanwhile, the display isn't updating at all. Not just the canvas, but the dialogs, the drawing tools, the menus, none of them are redrawing.
Third, there doesn't seem to be anyway to cancel the operation without quitting (which I obviously don't want to do because I stupidly didn't save).
Actually, in another instance of inkscape, I see that the blur slider only goes to a hundred, and at 100 it is perfectly snappy with two strokes. The drawing that is pegging the machine only has a few dozen strokes, so it seems that complexity here is rather non-linear.
So, here are somethings I think should be added:
First, perhaps it would be possible for Inkscape to auto-save to /tmp or someplace when the user hasn't explicitely saved anywhere yet.
Second, perhaps there should be some bound for render time.
Third, the rest of the GUI should at least redraw, even if the canvas doesn't, and it should at least respond to some commands. Undo or save would be commands I might consider trying to execute during a long render.
Fourth, would it be possible to thread this? Perhaps one thread for the GUI and one for rendering as a starting point? It would be great to thread rendering, but I can see how that wouldn't be so straight forward.
Fifth, is there any chance of using something to accelerate certain drawing operations, like blurs? Possibly with C code (which could then have a generic version and compile time select between that or a SSE version or an Altivec version)? Or something like Pyscho, pyrex, or pypy?
Sixth, this is probably more of a personal taste request, but perhaps the blur slider could be logarithmic? Creatively, the difference between 60 and 62 is pretty small, but the differences at the low end are big.