The Inkscape team and community are proud to announce the release of Inkscape 0.44, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool." Inkscape is a Vector editor along the lines of Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, Corel Draw, etc except the source code is open to anyone and it is free of charge. Inkscape uses the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) scalable vector graphics format (SVG). As usual, this release has addressed a number of high priorty issues that users had reported and is the most fetaure packed version to date. We owe a huge thanks to the strong developers and user community that have contributed countless hours on Inkscape 0.44.

New Features in 0.44

Layers Dialog: Probably one of the most oft-requested features... a traditional Layers Dialog. In addition, we do also have support for sub-layers now as well.
Outline Mode: An alternate rendering mode that shows all paths and shapes rendered as inverse (black on light background and vice versa) outlines of constant width (1 screen pixel regardless of zoom), without fill.
Docked Color Palette: At the bottom of the interface we now have a color palette docked for easy access to a palette of your choice. We have included a number of stock palettes with it as well which can be accessed by the arrow to the right of the colors.
Node Sculpting: Normally, when you have several nodes selected and you drag one of them, all selected nodes move by the same amount. Now, if you Alt-drag one of the selected nodes, only that node is fully displaced; other selected nodes are moved less than the full amount, so that those farthest from the drag point remain stationary. This is similar to "proportional editing" or "soft selection" in 3D editors such as Blender. The best part? It reacts to pressure sensitivity of a tablet pen.
Selected Style Indicator: Similar to style selectors from other software but a little different. On the left end of the statusbar you can quickly view and change the fill and stroke of the selected objects. One benefit is when you select multiple objects with different fills, it can blend colors as well as inform you of what different styles are applied.
Calligraphy - Tremor: Adjustable in the Controls bar from 0.0 to 1.0, it will affect your strokes producing anything from slight unevenness to wild blotches and splotches. This significantly expands the creative range of the tool.
Paste Size: A number of commands are added to easily scale selected objects to match the size of the object(s) previously copied to the clipboard. They are all in the Paste Size submenu in Edit menu.
Effects: Our extensions are now enabled by default on all platforms.
Clipping & Masking: Any object can be non-destructively intersected with a path (called a clipping path) so that only the intersected portion of the object is visible. Any object can be non-destructively masked by another object (called mask) so that: the mask's black or transparent areas become fully transparent in the masked object; mask's opaque white areas become fully opaque; and all intermediate colors translate into intermediate levels of opacity in the masked object.
Selective Bitmap Tracing with SIOX: We have an early version of the Simple Interactive Object Extraction (SIOX) algorithm (see siox.org) implemented in this release. This clever algorithm from the realm of Image Recognition allows you to extract a foreground object from the background with ease.
Improved PDF Export w/ Transparency: It's not perfect by any means, but a big improvement over our last release. Expect much bigger and better changes for the next release too.
New icons, redesigned preferences dialogs, rearranged menus, many cosmetic improvements
Hundreds of bug fixes, rendering speed is faster, and many other improvements!

Inkscape is open to all types of contributions by people with all different skill levels from around the world. Inkscape needs translators, web designers, people to help answer questions, and developers to help reach the project's goal of SVG compliance and to be the best vector editor around.

Inkscape website - At the top of the page it has a download link that should take you directly to the appropriate download for your operating system. (well, for Windows and Mac at least... Linux users have multiple options)
Release Notes - If you want more in-depth info on the changes since the last version, this is the place.
Screenshots
Inkscape Manual

Inkscape on dA
dA Inkscape Community
Inkscape art in the dA community (developer selections)

As a final note, please report any bugs you may find. There will be a few “point” releases with bug fixes for this stable version (there always are).

Enjoy! on behalf of the rest of the Inkscape developers. Draw Freely.