Furniture and Cabinet Design Update Notice

We are at the end of Version 3 incremental releases, having completed the list of twenty some new features and improvements we compiled a year ago with your input.  You might remember our survey.

The last installment will be updated  late this week.

Three significant features / improvements include:

1. Speed increases.  In our test case – a large kitchen with many cabinets and other assemblies – the load times reduced from just over 5 minutes to just about 20 seconds.  This increases you productivity.
2. Merging of assemblies.  SketchList 3D Pro now allows you specify two assemblies to merge together as one.  This provides a great deal of flexibility in design and control over the design process.  For example you can take some portion of an overall design and treat it as an assembly.  Then when you are satisfied that it is what you want – merge it into another assembly.  Or call in a standard assembly from your library and make it part of your existing work.  The advantage is easier placement of objects.
3. FRACTIONS – yes I think we are largely there with consistent display of fractions – for us users of the Imperial measuring system.  As users point out sometimes dimensions were awkwardly displayed as very long decimal values instead of ones like 61/64ths.  Someone has been going over these and changing things over.  I suspect that you may still find an instance of decimal ‘creep’ and if you do please send me an email telling us where you found it.  We’ll fix it.

We’ll move onto Version 4i in the spring.  Inputs please…

The other thing I’ve been busy with is doing designs making more use of standard objects.  For example I’ve re-created a kitchen for a user and am saving all the elements as standards to be used again and again (standard cabinets like B241D1D – meaning something line base 24 wide with 1 door and 1 drawer).    While users like to create things from scratch to ‘do it my way’ (a la Frank Sinatra) – others are looking to speed things up by using standards.  This a much better solution now that we can so easily stretch and shrink cabinets.

With the pace of development we haven’t really been keeping pace with instructional videos.  Four on my Christmas list are:

1. Slanting Boards
2. Rotating Boards and Cabinets
3. Stretch and Shrink – the inside story.  This is an incredibly powerful set of features.
4. Merging assemblies

As always please contact me with any questions, problems or suggestions.

Dave