FloorDesign

FloorDesign is intended to help you draw architectural plans. It is mainly intended for non-professional use, particularly home owners who would like to foresee any changes in their property, including exterior, interior and landscaping.

Although the application is not so difficult to use, it is a shame that its help documentation is so poor.

Its interface is composed of a main window with a canvas in the center, a left-side panel containing different kinds of objects as well as right-side panel to manage layers. Besides, there are a series of modal windows, which can become annoying at times.

The application lets you draw a 2D plan including walls, floor, furniture, doors, windows and even some landscaping elements. In this respect, it is excellent that the tool allows working with the exact scale measurements, which you can change by both dragging handlers and entering the dimensions in the properties box. Good news it that you can create templates from the rooms you have created, which may save you a lot of work in the future.

One of the benefits of using this tool is that there are tons of predefined objects you can use in your design, like pieces of furniture. This way, you can pick the ones that look like the ones you are actually planning to use. Besides, their dimensions can be customized to match the real size of the intended objects. Moreover, there is a huge library of basic shapes and symbols. Likewise, there are different textures you can assign to floors and walls.

Once you have created your plan, you can proceed to export it in such popular formats as PNG, JPEG, TIFF and PDF. Similarly, it is possible to send it directly to printer. Compared with other similar applications, the main disadvantage of FloorDesign is that it cannot generate a 3D view of the room, which would allow you to have a better idea of what it would look like.

All in all, FloorDesign is certainly not as powerful as other CAD applications out there. However, its price makes it a better option if you are not a professional designer or architect who just wants to preview some ideas. Unfortunately, there is no trial version for Mac. However, there is one if you are also a Windows user.