Archive for category RIA

Check out Autodesk’s Project Drag­on­fly, a slick, web-based app that makes cre­at­ing in two and three dimen­sions a breeze.

There’s not much of a learn­ing curve involved — click, drag, rotate, resize — it’s all very intu­itive. If you’ve played The Sims at all, you’ll be right at home with Drag­on­fly. No, it’s not a commercial-strength app like Auto­Cad, but it’s at least as good as any of the boxed “3D home designer” pro­grams I’ve played around with in the past.

Drag­on­fly makes arrang­ing things easy by snap­ping to a grid and dis­play­ing guides to let you know when you’re lined up with other objects in the room. To help align walls, doors, or win­dows, mea­sure­ments are dis­played when you add or mod­ify an item.

There are loads of archi­tec­tural and design ele­ments to choose from, all cat­e­go­rized and fully search­able. Reg­is­ter for an account and you’ll be able to save your designs and export them to JPG or DWG (you know, in case you want to ship it off to your archi­tect or engineer).

While it’s easy to use, Drag­on­fly is sur­pris­ingly pow­er­ful. It would be even bet­ter with some land­scape design fea­tures, but who knows — per­haps that’s some­thing AutoDesk will add in the future.