This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations.
Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.
I don't think you're giving his argument enough credit. Since he's a pro, he probably knows what he's talking about.
I've tried Magic-Plan, and yeah, it was frustrating and too inaccurate to be useful.
Start at the use case: Why would you need this? As a home-owner who's done it, I can't think of any except remodeling. Wether you're replacing the carpet, getting rid of a half-wall, putting in a new beam, measuring out a bathroom for a remodel, you need good, accurate measurements for this stuff.
If just eyeballing it was good enough you wouldn't need the tool in the first place. Guess. Look at your 1' floor tiles, count 'em, and you've got a probably better read on everything.
What would've really helped me out when doing this was a great, simple to use tool to help me build floor plans. Most of what I found on the App Store for the iPad was pretty shoddy, or just difficult to use effectively. Like I want snap-to-grid. But once I put a wall in the exact location I want the option to lock position. Or lock length.
So I dunno. I feel like he/she has a point. When approaching this problem, and needing to make a compromise, you don't compromise on accuracy or you've made your tool irrelevant. If they'd just focused on a really great floor planning tool that would have been the better compromise.
That said I haven't tried it yet, so maybe that's there. I'm gonna give it a shot.
Comments
This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations.
Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.
I don't think you're giving his argument enough credit. Since he's a pro, he probably knows what he's talking about.
I've tried Magic-Plan, and yeah, it was frustrating and too inaccurate to be useful.
Start at the use case: Why would you need this? As a home-owner who's done it, I can't think of any except remodeling. Wether you're replacing the carpet, getting rid of a half-wall, putting in a new beam, measuring out a bathroom for a remodel, you need good, accurate measurements for this stuff.
If just eyeballing it was good enough you wouldn't need the tool in the first place. Guess. Look at your 1' floor tiles, count 'em, and you've got a probably better read on everything.
What would've really helped me out when doing this was a great, simple to use tool to help me build floor plans. Most of what I found on the App Store for the iPad was pretty shoddy, or just difficult to use effectively. Like I want snap-to-grid. But once I put a wall in the exact location I want the option to lock position. Or lock length.
So I dunno. I feel like he/she has a point. When approaching this problem, and needing to make a compromise, you don't compromise on accuracy or you've made your tool irrelevant. If they'd just focused on a really great floor planning tool that would have been the better compromise.
That said I haven't tried it yet, so maybe that's there. I'm gonna give it a shot.
floor plans when finding renters, determining furniture layout, how much paint to buy. to name 3
No data is better than bad data.