Domain Name Com's Software Punch! Home Design Studio (Mac)

Software Punch! Home Design Studio (Mac)

Domain Name Com's - Software : Punch! Home Design Studio (Mac)

- Much less developed than Windows version
As the other reviews have pointed out, this Mac version has turned out to be a big disappointment. After spending the money and a fair amount of time trying to figure out the unintuitive software, I learned there were virtually no construction-related tools (framing designer, etc etc). I'd consider this more a sophisticated toy than a serious house-design software. It's too bad Punch is not more honest and up-front about the limitations of this software.

Rating:

- A Puzzling Product Story
I've been working with this software five days a week, 7-plus hours a day. I've read many reviews about it. And I confess to being completely baffled by this puzzling mystery: Why don't the Punch software people invest in some good interface design for a major new Punch release? This software has such obvious potential.

The review consensus, here and at other sites, seems to boil down to this: it is hands-down, the best home-design out there. AND this is faint praise because it has few competitors that can touch it in power and flexibility, short of a professional CAD program. This is a mass-market product; there are lots of small businesses trying to use it as well as plenty of homeowners. Judging by these reviews, the program's actual use seems simultaneously to be a most frustrating experience for many reviewers, with clumsy navigation, less-than-optimal implementations of half-thought-out features, barely adequate libraries, and just plain missing features, along with the best graphics engine in its niche.

After using it myself, I have some suggestions to make. In fact, I'll lead the redesign team myself, if they want me to, because for me, it was hours of fun. Really. with so much missed revenue-generating potential, I'd work for stock options. The property has SUCH potential that I don't know why it's been overlooked by its publishers.

First, I think the rendering engine on this program is really impressive. It has reasonable rendering rates on reasonably affordable platforms such as the Intel-backed iMacs. It seems quite stable and responsive, even on older Macs, though the speed differences can vary widely with different OS/hardware combinations (I did not test it on the PC).

That said, the critics are only partly right about the usability problems. I am an experienced user of 3D programs, and after an hour or so, I had the navigation down pretty well in the Live View window. It is reasonably usable, meaning my sense is, if the features justified the investment, most people who could benefit from using this software would be able to learn it.

Usability could be improved, and brought closer to standards established by other graphical design and visualization software, especially for navigation and window control in the 2D tools. But most of the core features are in place.

The real missed opportunity here lies in features. Many of the features most useful to users are also target-marketing opportunities to die for. For instance, the program has Content Libraries, and advertises their availability as a feature. The libraries include content from home design product vendors, such as tile, paint, and wallpaper vendors. I was pleased to see they had a Partner program that included Sherwin-Williams, since there was a store near the design site. I'd looked forward to picking up paint chips and trying out various colors. The problem was, there was no way to match the color samples at Sherwin-Williams to the representations of color in the program. After three weeks, I hadn't discovered any way to know what color to buy once I'd chosen something from the S-W paint library, nor had I found a way to input a color by number, update new samples from the Sherwin-Williams web site, or mix a color from a palette and find the closest match to paint that met my criteria, such as interior vs. exterior, or finish availability.

You see what I mean? This is an obvious win-win if Punch can work a bit on that partner program and the business model supporting it. Sherwin-Williams would sell more paint (and get an edge on Behr's until THEY sign a partner agreement with Punch), and the consumer is delighted to buy the software when they find out they can actually preview their actual paint color. Doh! What am I missing here? Can it be this easy?

Punch's concept is right, but the libraries are so disappointingly limited that its utility as a design tool is likewise limited. Design features we wanted to add, such as a greenhouse window, were missing. Simple window features, such as recessed frames, are missing. These are missed opportunities for manufacturers of windows. Well, you can't have everything before you ship, right?

No, but you can provide ways of updating content, and importing and exporting content so users who have unique architectural features can create them. Perhaps they could share objects with others. Users creating and sharing (free) content creates user communities. User communities create more marketing opportunities. More content attracts more users.

Punch's decision to use a proprietary graphics format just doesn't seem to make economic sense. I could find only one "power user"" advertising her work on the user forums, a clear sign that the format is a forbidding hurdle even for users with considerable 3D modeling experience. This is an old business model, and Google's SketchUp, with it's open formats, may eventually catch up with it.

All of this is a shame, because the software is lots of fun, despite these gripes. We've found it useful. So on the whole, I'd buy it again. But what a shame.

Rating:

- Great Toy, Light on serious features
If you are looking for a program to do a 3d view of your dream home without any substance, this program is for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a program to help you design real projects for a do-it-yourselfer you are going to be sorely out of luck.

Punch Home design Studio is just a toy with little substance. You can put up a wall and throw down a sink but you cant run piping to that sink or electric to the bathroom lights. Its like a great big content editing program for a 3d video game with as much use as that. A toy to be experimented with but not appropriate for much more. When I querried about how to put in piping for my radiant floor I was told that you dont do that because the plumber does that. Now what if I am going to be the plumber, Im supposed to just shoot from the hip? Ditto for the rest of the details.

When it comes to the landscape editor, the joke gets worse. Of 32 plants I had planned to put in my renovated garden, PHDSP had 2. Yest, only two plants of 32 were found in the library and the interface to that library stinks.

While we are on the subject of the interface, the Mac interface is very bad. Clearly this is a bad hack port of a windows program. The user interface is not like a mac program but more like Office for Mac -- clearly a low quality hack. If that wasnt enough, when running it on leopard, it tends to crash and erase everything you did since the last save, so if you do intend to play with this thing, save often.

So why am I making this post? Well because I tried to return the software and was unable to return it even just the next day. I was told that the $149 I plopped down for a lemon with overinflated advertising was lost. Maybe I can eek out some cash on eBay for it. Yes I am upset.

In summary, I was looking for a program that was useful for helping me design my home do-it-yourself projects from installign radiant heating to planning my sprinkler system and what I got was a poorly implemented toy to assemble pre-fabricated 3d objects into a pretty picture. Advertising scores a 10 of 10 for promising much but the program will only be minimally useful.

Rating:

- Great Features - Could use a Tutorial
This product has everything I am looking for to play around with home remodel ideas, but it could use a basic tutorial that demonstrates how to draw a house and the property landscapes. I am trying to draw a simple ranch with an exposed basement and cathedraled ceilings. Where do I begin? The book is useful, but I've made a lot of mistakes trying to do the simple basics of a house. Besides, who wants to read with today's technology. I still haven't figured out how to walk through the house. Thankfully the fly over view works. I'd pay for a simple tutorial.

Rating:

- A capable but hard to use product
this product has tons of features but it was not nearly as easy to use as I had hoped. The interface was confusing, the interaction methods are completely foreign to the Mac. I've been using Macs since '85 and I've used hundreds of different programs. Most have a somewhat familiar feel to them, even if you DO have to read the book to use advanced features. This one was so weird I couldn't even draw a line without reading the manual first.

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