You know what they say? ‘You get what you pay for.’ Well, sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not.
This branch of the O’Briens are condo dwellers. What we want is a home and a backyard and a garage (that we don’t have to hike to), so we’re looking at neighborhoods, and assuming we win the next lottery, we’re also looking at house designs (as in, ‘build your own’). Regardless of which house we choose, we’ve decided to plan ahead and figure out where furniture would go in advance. The House Design app creates interior designs right on your Mac.
Sketch out each room’s dimensions and then drop in furniture pieces arranged to fit.
It works pretty well and the user interface is completely self explanatory. It comes with over 300 furniture items and materials (wood floors, tile floors, etc.) which are easily used in the 2D layout.
There are two basic problems I’ve encountered. Rooms are not easily moved within the layout (manual resizing, though), and there’s no demo mode or lite version to try first.
My threshold for trying an app from the Mac App Store with a price tag is about $2.99, unless the reviews are ecstatic and multiple in nature. House Design far exceeds that amount, and there’s no lite or free version, not a word about the app on the developer’s website (no screenshots, no video of how to use the app– nothing).
It’ll work, of course, and it’s better than scratching out room layouts on a legal pad in pencil, but hard earned money needs more features.
The Cappy says
If you’re going to complain about the price, you should mention the price. I checked it out myself and nearly did a spit-take. Somebody might read your gripes and think the app cost a ton of money. It’s a desktop app that costs $15. So you seem to have thought it was pretty good except for 2 things: it needs to be free, and it needs to have easily movable room where manually resizable doesn’t count. When did we become such cheapskates that we begrudge people even these tiny prices — which don’t come near to supporting the cost of development in all likelihood. It’s this attitude that’s given rise to the dominance of the freemium model. When things are free, they’re either a LOT lower quality, or they turn out to be incredibly expensive when you really use them. And often both.
iggy pence says
Cappy, take a chill pill. The complaint about the price was based on not having a trial version or lite version (a common complaint about Mac App Store apps, by the way; many apps have a free or lite version, with an upgrade to the full version), not the actual price. This one costs $15, which is well above what I would pay without a trial version, too. House Design looks like a decent way to do interior layouts, but the developer didn’t even bother to create a trial version, and the website is devoid of any detail whatsoever. Tera should have ripped on that, too. Oh. Wait. She did. Good review. Valid criticisms.