I am an iPhone themer. iPhone theming is an art that people who jailbreak their iPhone and iPod Touches engage in to create art for the "desktop", if you will, of the iDevices. I thought I would take an unconventional approach in making an iPhone theme, and Inkscape seemed like the way to go. I chose Inkscape for this because when I got The Book if Inkscape at the library, it said that the difference between bitmap editing and vector editing is that when you create circles in, say, GIMP, you get gray pixels that make it look like a circle. In Inkscape, it actually is a circle. And circles are important in iPhone theming. So onto my question.

I am trying to make an iPod icon for my theme. I have the main square made, and big circle made, and the small button in the middle of the circle made. i also have the "screen" of the iPod as another object, but I don't know how to make it transparent. I have uploaded the file I am using since I am having difficulty describing my issue. So here's what I want to do. In GIMP, I can make an object in another layer, merge layers, select a color, then make all areas with the selected color transparent. I have tried to do that with Inkscape, but it's not working.I have grouped the objects, then gone into the XML, and made the "screen" fill and stroke from the pink to "none". But it just takes the pink object, and makes it transparent, revealing the red underneath. I'm not sure what else to do. It seems like a simple problem, but difficult for a new user like me. I'm thinking that I need to edit the XML of the big object to make the coordinates of the pink object transparent in the red object. How would I do that? If that's not possible, then how do I do it?

you're trying to do bitmap editing in a vector editor. there are fundamental differences that change how you have to think about the problem. I can't view your file at work and I can't understand the issue completely from your description, but I think there are two things that might be what you're after:
1. You want to make the area of the rectangle where the screen is transparent so that the background shows through--to do this make your ipod rectangle and your screen rectangle paths and do path>difference.
2. You want to make part of your screen transparent but not all of it--you need to use a mask over the screen (note that if you want the background to show through instead of the ipod rectangle you need to duplicate your screen rectangle first and then do the path>difference as above before applying a mask to the screen rectangle).

Now that I'm home I see that you probably want to do option 1. I've attached the file after I've done that and added a checkerboard background so you see that it is transparent where the pink rectangle used to be.

thanks for the replies, but i figured it out! see, what i did is i selected both the main red rectangle and the small pink one. then i went and did the path>difference thing (i did this before the topic was even approved), and i got the affect i wanted! im posting an image so that you can see what i wanted in the first place. i took the screen shot of the path where my files go. so ya, thats all i needed. i already did know the major differences between vector and bitmap, but now i can have the best of both in inkscape!