A powerful yet easy to use mobile app that allows you to design anything from a room to an entire house and even estimate how to charge accordingly.
Designing rooms or entire buildings is what you’d expect to do on a computer, but sometimes, you need to do things on the go. Better yet, you need to focus on the plan and make alterations, where you’ll be doing the actual physical work. This is where MagicPlan comes in. This service is designed to work of a phone or tablet running iOS or Android. The app itself is free, and you can try out the service without paying a thing, but if you’re going to be using it regularly, you’ll have to grab yourself a subscription (more on that later). Having installed the app, you then need to create an account, and you’re good to go. Creating a new project is simple: just tap on the large blue ‘+’. You have the option of naming your project and even add the address of where the work will be undertaken, but all of that is optional. Tap on the other blue tick to start designing. This is where you’ll see one of MagicPlan’s cool features: ‘Scan with Camera’. If you’re in the room you’ll be working on, you can use AR (augmented reality) to let the app scan and measure the room for you. It worked okay, although we suspect this would function a lot better in an unfurnished room. Whichever option you choose (AR assisted or manual), you start by describing the room’s location: which floor is it on, and what type of space is it. There’s a wealth of options to choose from, be it a commercial or residential location (private office, cafeteria, hall, study, living room, cellar, but name but a few). You’re then thrust into design mode. The creation process is pretty simple. If you’ve selected a square room, you’re presented with four walls. Tap on one of them to select it, and then drag it in our out to resize the room. Tap on a corner to alter that space from that point instead. You can also split a wall to create irregular shaped areas. As you do so, you MagicPlan displays all the measurements you need to make sure your design remains accurate (by default our app showed measurements in feet and inches – if you need to change that, this can be done from your account’s ‘Settings’ tab).
