Software frustration

Lord, hours of frustration, reminding me why computers, software and the people who sell them are the cause of the statistics about the number of workers who wish grievious bodily harm on their PCs.

I had a copy of Home Designer tucked away (I bought it a while back to model up our lounge room during some interior renovations). I thought I might give it a try and model up the floor plan of green fields cafe #2, the one the agent sent a scale plan through for yesterday. I re-installed the software, and successfully imported the floor plan image and started to draw in the walls. Within 1 minute I was reaching for the help file. The cafe has several walls that are not nice clean right angles - the whole main room is not square. The software felt like it was 'snapping' to a grid, because I could not fine tune the wall angles, they 'clicked' from one position to the next, nothing like the fine control I needed.

Finally I found the reason in the Help - the walls only would snap around on a 7 or so degree grid. I jumped on Google, and found some others with the same problem, and a suggestion that we needed Home Designer 7.0 - which has an option to turn off the snapping. I had v6.0. So I bought and paid online for 7.0. Which took several hours to download for a 500Meg file (slow server their end presumably).

Finally 7.0 was installed, I fired up.... and hey presto, no option to turn off snapping. $US60 down the drain.

Back to Google, and finally I found some forum posts, including items from staff at the software company. Turning off snapping is only available in the Pro version ($US495 no thanks) or the Home Designer Suite 7.0 - for $US99. The 'Suite' of course is the same damn software but with a few extras thrown in.

I decided I wasn't the slight bit interested in giving this firm more money so took myself off to Harvey Norman and bought a copy of their main competition - Punch! Interior Design Suite. Three CDs and a 3Gb+ chunk of my hard drive later I was up and running.

It DOES let me fine tune walls. So I dived in and pretty soon had the basic floor plan organised. But as with my previous experience with this type of software I'm realising it ain't as easy as they like to make it look. I can see how I could spend literally days working up the design - the walls, floors etc are easy enough to position. But of course the actual textures I want aren't set up as standard. And non of the furniture is available because this is a domestic product intended for house design, not fitting out a cafe. At the end of the day almost certainly it will be easier and quicker if more expensive to simply ask the architects to work up interior visualisations.