Tangentially, are there any open source alternatives that mimic the "Save for web" functionality of the Adobe products?

I feel like this black box functionality has made Adobe products almost mandatory for web designers and I'd like to see innovation in this area.

I'd love to see a tool that better takes into account color space issues with varying monitors (PC vs Mac) right from the start.

This is a horrible, convoluted workflow - with good reasons for being that way. Like many I’ve seen graphic designers engage in.

Their tools suck, badly, and are just letting them down. I know the difficulty of replacing those tools is high - but man it needs to be done.

Our drawing app WebCode (http://www.webcodeapp.com) instantly generates nice and readable SVG code from your drawings. It also outputs JavaScript HTML5 Canvas code and HTML+CSS code.

Does anyone know a good tool to go from an SVG to all the app icon sizes? I found a couple of non vector tools in that space but nothing for when you can start with the SVG.

Do you mean automatically? Inkscape can certainly save an svg to different sized outputs. Perhaps there's a plugin for this use case (Inkscape is scriptable with python)

I do use Inkscape although I find it a bit clumsy particularly in output. May look at scripting it one day. I will have a look for plugins.

I was also disappointed that the latest version isn't built for OS X and while there are instructions to build it without using X they didn't work first time and I didn't have all day to hack on it.

Sketch. http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/