While prerendered might be the norm for other applications it hasn't been for Inkscape. The primary reason why we ship with the SVG About is so that people can crack it open and see how it was made. Perhaps it should be brought up on the developer mailing list about possibly ALSO distributing with a prerendered PNG file to use in-application for a faster load of that dialog. I will also mention though that in the cairo branch it is significantly faster to come up and render (still not "immediate" though, but much better).
Gary,
While prerendered might be the norm for other applications it hasn't been for Inkscape. The primary reason why we ship with the SVG About is so that people can crack it open and see how it was made. Perhaps it should be brought up on the developer mailing list about possibly ALSO distributing with a prerendered PNG file to use in-application for a faster load of that dialog. I will also mention though that in the cairo branch it is significantly faster to come up and render (still not "immediate" though, but much better).