Feature Requests Captured - Please Review!!!

December 22, 2003 - The various Feature Requests collected from different developers, the WIKI, chatting with other users, and old RFE's from the SodiPodi days have been moved to the Inkscape RFE tracker on Sourceforge. Please review these feature requests, make comments, prioritize them, and post your proposals to the WIKI page NewFeatureProposals.

Progress with Features and Code Cleanup

December 20, 2003 - The new boolean operations feature has received a good deal of attention, finding ways to better integrate the code into the existing codebase, and identifying and fixing various issues identified while using it. Shortcut keys have also been established so that the operations can be conducted via the keyboard as well as menus. We're confident that users will find this a very useful new capability.

Work has begun on converting certain areas of the codebase to C++. Jon Cruz has converted the color selector files to C++ as he's working on bugs and requests for changes to this system. Internally, "Inkscape" has been renamed "Inkscape::Application" to prepare for new namespacing work. Bryce has written a proposal for the new subsystem architecture, including the proposed new namespaces.

Several developers think the spiral tool may not be very useful in its current form. We considered removing it, but decided to leave it in until a more general purpose replacement becomes available. An idea of collecting the odd shapes into an objects button on the primary toolbar was floated.

As part of the codebase cleanup, we've begun to scope out the coding style conventions to be used. Mental has finished the work of making SPActions per-view, and reduced usage of the SP_ACTIVE_DESKTOP macro. Nathan has been refactoring existing code to remove multiple implementations of geometric operators, to this end a new class, NR:Point was added to libnr, and work started on replacing NRPoints.

New Enhancements to Export Dialog

December 19, 2003 - Alexander Clausen (aka sk1p) has contributed a few improvements to the export dialog. First is a patch to add two missing error dialogs for if the user forgot to enter a filename or set the wrong coordinates. The second patch incorporates an export progress bar. The third patch adds a Browse button, defaulting to the dir the svg was saved in, or defaulting to $HOME if it hasn't been saved before.

0.36 Binary and Source Packages Available

December 19, 2003 - Several people have contributed binary packages for additional platforms, including Win32, Sparc, and RedHat 9.0. A few problems have been identified, including trouble compiling with the --gnome-print option, and misbehaviors on Win32. Bug reports have been entered on these, and people finding new problems are encouraged to check the list and submit other issues they find.

People have been having some trouble with the Win32 version, but several users are contributing tips on the mailing list for getting it up and running, and a couple developers are working on finding ways to solve the problems. Hopefully the 0.37 release will be much smoother for Windows users.

New Rubberbanding Keyboard Shortcut

December 19, 2003 - Bulia has added a rubberbanding capability. Now if Shift is pressed before you start dragging, you always get rubberband, even if you start from an object. It's VERY convenient. Without it, if you had a big background object in your drawing, you simply could not use rubberband because you always ended up dragging the background. Now you can, just press Esc and then Shift-rubberband for a new selection.

Capturing Feature Requests

December 18, 2003 - Jon Phillips has been working to copy over appropriate Requested Feature Enhancements (RFEs) from Sodipodi and integrating them with our own, and with the programming tasks. These are currently being captured into a gnumeric spreadsheet and will be posted to Wiki and the Inkscape RFE tracker.

New Simplify-path and Inset/Offset Capabilities Added

December 16, 2003 - New capabilities for doing path inset/offset and for simplifying the nodes in a path have been added, making it possible to "clean up" paths by removing unnecessary nodes. This is being tested and UI elements generated for its use.

Project Status

December 15, 2003 - A Project Statistics and a brief synopsis of recent activity has been posted.

Successful Porting of Inkscape to C++!!

Nathan, Mental, and Bryce hammered away at the codebase over the weekend, and after approximately 60 man-hours of labor have successfully gotten the codebase compiling and linking with g++. This marks the successful completion of the C++ conversion project and allows us to begin taking advantage of OOP for making the codebase better abstracted and more modular, so that it will be easier to maintain and add features.

Progress converting codebase to C++

I've begun working my way through sodipodi making everything work with g++.

At this point I have done: libnr/* libnrtype/* inkscape.c Not complete, but partly working: helpers widgets

To test, just change the CC=gcc line in the makefile and make clean && make the aim is to have inkscape compile both in gcc and g++.

The biggest problem is _(). most effort has been fixing variables named 'new' and 'class' and sorting out the various string types.

I also found a bug thanks to the type system (two params swapped) :).

Inkscape Forms!

A group of Sodipodi developers establish the Inkscape Project to pursue creation of a fully SVG-compliant open source editor and to continue the logical development of the Sodipodi codebase in this direction.