I'm officially an Inkscape nerd.  I'm geeking out about the upcoming features in Inkscape 0.46.

The last version introduced blurring, which is significant but not something I've used much myself yet, but I've seen it put to impressive use.   But 0.46 is introducing features that could seriously reduce the amount of time it take for me to create a drawing.

It starts with simple things like being able to select objects using Touch Selection, which I think means you can just draw a line freehand over any objects you want to select, as opposed to draging a rectangle over them.  And then there's the added functions to the Calligraphy tool including Trace Guide and Trace Background which will make wood engraving styles drawing very quick and easy.  What I will find most useful of these tools is the thinning and thickening function which will make it quicker to create irregular thicknessed lines (without requiring a steady hand).

But the best feature of all is the Paint Bucket Tool which will allows you to fill an enclosed area with a colour - kinda like the tools of the same name do in raster programs but it creates a vector shape.  This will make the process of defining shapes for a drawing like this take 5 minutes instead of 50. It's going to make Inkscape very easy for everyone to use.

This is one of things I love about Inkscape over Illustrator.  Their features make using the tool easier and faster whilst Illustrator seems to focus on creating more complicated features and leaving the basics functions difficult to access.