telynor's Full Review: Punch! Home Design Complete 2.0 Full Version for P...
I bought this one on a whim. Having cut my teeth on the plethora of home design products out there, I first tried 3D Hoime Design Suite, and found it to be both entertaining and useful. Then I had heard about this one, and decided to give it a try.
Oh lord, what a mistake I made!
Unlike 3D Home, this one is a boxy, clumsy progam to use. Rooms are preset for their dimensions, along with the overall size of the plan, there's very little flexibility to the use of the images. Unlike Total3D, this has a very limited click-and-drag technology, and very limited flexibility -- if you don't know how to work Adobe Illustrator. Once I figured that part out, it was easier for me to manuever around the program, but I still ended up muttering and swearing at it.
Installation is easy. Windows has an installation wizard for this one, you just pop in the cd-rom disk, and click away at the prompts. You'll also be invited to register the item on line as well. Once you have it installed and ready to go, it stands to reason that you ought to be able to design right away.
Wrong!
First you need to set up your overall dimensions, and only then can you add rooms. Since each room is already preset in the width and depth and height, there isn't much you can do if you change your mind and want to make a room bigger -- in fact, if you change your mind about the size, you need to scrap your entire plan and begin again. After the third time, I gave up designing a house, and just tried to do a solitary room (the reason why I bought the program in the first place was to rework the living room over in some new color and furnishings, but I digress).
Snag number two -- unlike Total3D, you don't get an instant view of the finished room if you wish. You must click onto a new program called RealModel(tm) to get a hint of what the finished effect will be. This, if anything, I found to be a real hassle, as the combined results managed to crash my machine not once, but three times.
By this point I was grinding my teeth in frustration and swearing loud enough to scare the cats. The landscape effects I skipped over entirely except for a brief foray, what you get is a picture standing up against another picture, cute, but not very effective. The design-your-own-furniture section is equally frustrating, with more having to draw your own items and set the parameters.
The instruction manual is at least spiral bound and will lay flat on the table -- which is a good thing, since you'll have to be referring to it a lot as you go along.
And now, at last, I come to final bit of this. The fact that it is so user-unfriendly is enough to make someone who does not have any experience in CAD or Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to be completely at sea here. It's a clunky, time-consuming program, and I regret spending my money on this bit of garbage. There are much better programs out there, such as I have already mentioned, and for those interested in doing their own landscaping, the Burpee's Garden Designer is more informative and has a better interface with the user.
In an amazing display of further obfuscation, neither the disc nor the manual show the system requirements, so I am working from memory here:
128K ram or better
CD-ROM drive
at least 50Mg spare space on your hard drive
For more information, there's the website: www.punchsoftware.com
Thanks to Ariel, Joubert and HawgWyld for putting together this "I Can't Believe I Bought this Piece of Junk Write-Off!"
allowing me to vent some spleen at the manufacturer's of this lousy software program. Thanks, you guys! To find out more, you can go to this website for a full list of the participants: http://www.geocities.com/ariel10575/epinions.com/ICBPOJWO.html. And happy anniversary to the hosts, Joubert and Hawgwyld.
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