Livingroom for iPad review

Livingroom is a application for designing rooms or even full houses. I can see where this could be a very useful app for those of us who prefer to work things out before we toss out our back (remember, lift with your legs!) and I believe developer Helix Coding is on the right track to building a solid application. But it’s not there yet.

I believe they will get there, if only because of the solid improvements from version 1.0 which I started testing with and upgrading to v1.1 a short time later.

Opening the application starts out with a blank piece of grid paper and a note pad. Along the top there is a menu with buttons for your rooms, an undo, a actions drop down which includes Help, Custom Textures, Edit Room Notes, Save to Photos and Email PDF.

The center of the menu area is a title area where the room name is located. On the right side of the menu is information, duplicate, trash, Room Configuration and a “+” that opens a menu on items such as a bed, doors, walls, etc. All the stuff you can add to your room.

In this extensive and growing list are all the usual suspects including sofas, chairs, windows, doors that open each direction. It covered everything I had in my rooms close enough that had everything in my house. Except for my bike rack and there was a generic box that worked fine for that. And hey! There was even the kitchen sink.

It’s easy and intuitive to add furniture and build out the room. The adding of buttons to allow you to ‘nudge’ items instead of dragging was a big improve in v1.1. The ability to hide and show the furniture made it much easier to work with doors, windows and walls.

One of my major frustrations with Livingroom was the only changes you can make to the room paper size was proportional. I wanted to scale the paper to the same proportions as the room I was working with. I could have added walls instead, but I prefer one sheet to be one room.

The other major issue I had was moving items around. I didn’t always get the movement I expected and that was very frustrating. If you just want to rotate or orient your furniture it is pretty easy, but some of the finer movements still needs some work.

There are plenty of tools to fill out the details of your room including colors and textures for your sofa and chairs, carpet and just about anything else you can come up with.

Livingroom for the iPad is $4.99 in the Lifestyles category in the App Store. While I can’t tag this application as buy now, I think there is a great chance this will be a great buy in an updated version.

Here is a video demo of the LivingRoom for iPad app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 2/5

AppSafari review of Livingroom for iPad was written by Blair Callicott on August 21st, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Homes, iPad apps. Page viewed 7656 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.