Hello!

First of all a brief introduction. I'm a student from Finland, studying at University of Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science. I'm part of a student group working on a project assignment to offer usability development aid to an open source project of our choice. We contacted Inkscape via developer mailing list to offer our help and in response we got a few suggestions of tasks that our team could work on. From those suggestions we ended up picking prototyping a new UI design for SVG Filter Editor as our main task for the project. Two weeks ago we completed this task and delivered our UI design as a blueprint to Inkscape Wiki.

There has already been some discussion about this blueprint on Inkscape developer mailing list, but in addition to developers feedback we would also like to hear some comments from wider range of users.

The blueprint itself can be found at Inkscape Wiki at: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... erEditorUI

Launchpad page for the blueprint is: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inksca ... -editor-ui

We'd appreciate any comments and feedback on the blueprint. Our team is also prepared to answer any questions you might have.

Welcome to the forum!
And also, thank you for your contributions of time, energy, skill and studies, to the Inkscape effort!
Inkscape has afforded me many, many happy hours of pretending to be an artist And I very much appreciate current and future developers' work on creating and improving Inkscape.

So I'm just an ordinary user of Inkscape. I have submitted a few bug reports, and certainly post many messages here on these forums. I think I probably will be a student of Inkscape for a long time, lol. But I don't understand the technical side of it, very much at all. I've spent a lot of time trying to learn how to use and create filters, with mostly disappointing results. But I still have more info yet to read, and hope I can eventually understand it better.

Your icon/node connection view in the custom editor does seem a little simpler, and I like the visual icon/button style, rather than the current dropdown lists. Especially I think the visual cues for each filter in the basic editor will be helpful. Every time I go to explore using a filter, I have to actually create a rectangle, and try each one, to learn what they do. So the visual style there will be quite beneficial. I'll be interested to see them, whenever they're ready.

I'm not sure if the icon/buttons on the Custom editor are like a final draft, or if you will be doing some more work there? But to me, the Displacement Map icon is not quite as informative as the others. The square with gray vertical lines is fine, but maybe a bit too small? I don't understand what the reddish-pink circle behind it represents. To me, the vertical lines are enough. All the others are great!

I'm sorry I can't give you a technical review, but there you have my comments as someone who uses Inkscape just for fun, a hobby
All best

One thing I'd love to see in a replacement filter editor is the ability to see the effect of the filter chain up to and including the selected filter node. In other words the ability to open a preview pane which shows the current object (or a square, circle, star or other test shape) with just a portion of the whole filter chain applied. This would make it much easier to see what each part of a complex filter chain contributes to the final output.

A related feature would be the means to disable an individual part of the chain. This would need three states: enabled, disabled (pass through), disabled (blocking). The pass through option would pass the input through to the output directly (and would only be available for filters with one input and one output). The blocking option would not produce any output, acting as though that part of the chain had been removed but not replaced with a connection. This would help when trying to tweak a complex filter or to determine whether or not a particular part of the chain is providing any worthwhile contribution.

I hope those descriptions make some sense.

OMG, if that were possible, it would be awesome!