Some improvements since the last announcement:

- All tools that were previously able to click to select (namely node, shapes, and gradient tools), can now do Shift+click (add to selection) and Alt+click (select under) exactly as the Selector tool.

- Dragging a gradient handle with Ctrl+Shift will scale the entire linear or radial gradient around its center.

- Gradient handles for each gradient are connected by blue lines for fill gradient and yellow lines for stroke gradient.

- In gradient tool, instead of dragging, you can double-click an object to create a new gradient centered within the object's bounding box. If you have several objects selected, or if your selected object is behind another one, you can double-click with Ctrl to create gradients on selected object(s) without changing selection.

- The selected gradient handle will intercept any color/opacity setting commands and apply them to the corresponding stop(s) of its gradient(s). This means that at least two-stop gradients can be completely edited without ever opening the Gradient Editor dialog. In particular, you can use these methods to change the color of the selected handle:

+ Dropper tool (for example, to blend a radial gradient onto background, select its outer handle and pick the background color with the dropper).

+ Paste style (if the pasted style contains both fill and stroke style, the stop will take the fill style).

+ Fill and stroke dialog [this does not quite work yet because the dialog switches to gradient button and won't let you edit the color]

- Double-clicking any gradient handle will open the Gradient Editor dialog with that handle's gradient loaded and the corresponding stop selected in the list.

- Before, the actual direction of the linear gradient was not always perpendicular to the line connecting it handles if the bounding box of the object was not a square. This is now fixed, though the fix only works for new gradients that you create (i.e. gradients in old files are not affected).

In other news, Richard Hughes' text layout rewrite appears to have reduced the memory consumption on a text-heavy document by about 20%, and rendering is faster by the same percentage. Hooray! :)