I haven't seen an official statement about "Blend". All I could find was a empty section on the release notes. Is the ability to set a blend mode a part of the SVG standard or will Inkscape have to work around the limitations of SVG? It's part of the spec, as one of the numerous filter ef...

Fire up GIMP and take a look at the Layers palette; there's a drop down of blend modes, such as "Burn", "Dodge", "Multiply", which cause the selected layer to alter the appearance of layers below. Each mode does something different to the colours -- generally lightening...

Blend modes is something I've been waiting for, and they're looking neat in the current SVN. The new calligraphy/"engraving" features look awesome too, from what I saw at LGM.