Recent changes in the unstable version and a new book

We have to admit that out main communication channel has silently moved from the homepage to the Google+ page where we post news on development, co-projects, unstable builds, art created with Inkscape and so on. We also reclaimed the @inkscape account on Twitter, but, unlike G+, we are not making a full use of it yet.

In the past few months we've seen a slight increase in development activity. There have been too numerous changes to mention, but here is what comes to mind in the first place.

Diederik van Lierop implemented tangent and perpendicular snapping to paths which works for some tools as well as guides.

More work was done on cleaning up and porting UI code to GTKMM. That means, for instance, that the Object Properties dialog is finally dockable.

Tavmjong Bah continued his experiments with mesh gradients which are expected to be part of SVG2. You can read in more details about that on his blog. The feature is only present in a separate branch, of which there are no builds yet. Currently it's very unstable and we are not sure yet if it's going to make it to v0.49.

Meanwhile Packt Publishing released “Inkscape Starter” by Bethany Hiitola — a new book that introduces newbies to Inkscape. The book is a very short introduction and is available for Kindle.