The next version (to be released in 2-3 weeks) is going to introduce full support for filters and color swatches. In the upcoming 12 months I expect to reach full feature parity with Inkscape.
Then I went ahead and tried it out... mind blown. It's that good. Feels like a native app in it's UI quality and speed. And $9/month is a very good price point, especially for those that regularly create vector art.
I'm amazed at the quality of your app. It'll be especially incredible once you're at Inkscape parity. How large is the team you got working full time?
BTW, the widget toolkit used by Boxy SVG is open sourced and can be used by other projects. You can try it out on https://xel-toolkit.org. In near future I'm planning to improve it by adding Windows 10 theme and full support for color schemes and dark mode.
Everyone on earth wants to turn a sale into a recurring revenue stream for a reason. Trivial individual costs add up substantially over time.
i clicked on the link of your site, and the first box i saw said "9$/month". that's enough to click away (for me).
only after i did some more clicking and followed an external(!) link to the store it was obvious you can do a one-time purchase.
in a normal situation i would never have gotten to that point and would have clicked away immediately after seeing 9/month for a new product that still has to prove itself and doesn't have a big name behind it.
Tracing could be easily implemented using third party libraries [2]. Custom extensions would be initially limited to the "Generators" panel. I haven't thought about the live path effects yet.
The hardest part remaining is full support for filters, but I have this feature mostly sorted out in the dev branch and the UI is going to be much nicer than in Inkscape [3][4].
[1] https://i.imgur.com/e08OW5x.png
[2] https://boxy-svg.com/ideas/5/vectorize-generator
Inkscape 1.0 adds what’s basically a more powerful version of that, a pressure-sensitive pencil, implemented with the powerstroke live path effect—more powerful, I say, because it’s editable, because it’s not immediately flattening it to what SVG can represent, but is also keeping its own editor information in namespaced attributes. That’s how you can add things like that and mesh gradients before SVG supports the concept.
I’m still intensely sceptical of your claim of full feature parity with Inkscape in a year, but I’ll believe parity for >95% of users and use cases.
My biggest problem with your app at the moment looks to be that path editing is painful compared with Inkscape. I like to show the outline of the path, and its keyboard and mouse operation also feels just all-round superior at present, and I don’t think that that’s just my greater familiarity with Inkscape showing through.
I’d also like more text labels and fewer icons. Iconless labels have no place on something like your filters panel; text labels are objectively superior. I’d say similar for the Defs panel and other such panels.
I wish you joy!
There should be an outline shown when you hover a path with the "Edit" tool [1], though it's a bit sloppy and needs more optimization. Most path-related commands are exposed by the "Shape" panel. To convert a node between a smooth and an edge type you must double-click it. The ability to box-transform selected nodes and to move them with arrow keys is missing but should be added soon.
My main problem with text labels is that they take a lot of horizontal space. Text labels could be shown only when the panel is wide enough to fit them, or when user hovers the icon (like it's done in Autodesk Graphic).
Not everything is possible this way; mesh gradients can’t be emulated in vectors, for example—though you could effectively implement a canvas-backed renderer for it to polyfill it; but a lot of functionality can be implemented without upstream support.
I was trying this out on my phone and although I had to switch to landscape to make the UI fit, it was buttery smooth!
I was really impressed with the sheer amount of features included, many of which I have never seen implemented in any other web based editor.
This is typically code for "doesn't respect my OS theme." I didn't like skinz in the past and that hasn't changed over the years, though the name has.
Good luck on an otherwise cool app however.
I'm not sure why you want new developers to donate to when the existing ones clearly didn't reach their goals yet.