Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 26-11-2010

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Autodesk Homestyler started off as an Autodesk Labs product, where it existed under the code-name Project Dragonfly. It has come a long way in the past year, with massive changes in its user interface, and feature set, and has since graduated from Autodesk to become a full fledged member of the Autodesk family of products. Even so, Autodesk Homestyler still remains a free product for anyone to use. You can use it without registering an account, however a number of features are only available for registered users, including saving projects online at Autodesk's servers.

• [The ODE] Autodesk Project Dragonfly
• Flash 10.2 goes mobile
• Project ROME a rich new content creation application by Adobe

Autodesk Homestyler is online application that allows you to lay out and furnish a building. The rich interface makes it amazingly simple to create even complicated floor plans, and furnish it to choice. One can switch between a 2D and 3D layout in real time to explore your design from all angles. Creating multi-storied buildings is also possible, and so is creating curved walls and other exotic designs. It is not a replacement for a full-fledged architecture application such as Autodesk Revit, but for the audience it targets, it is perfect.

2D View of project	Corrresponding 3D view

It is amazing to see how much is possible in this application straight in the browser, without sacrificing ease of use. Autodesk Homestyler is possibly one of the most impressive utilizations of Flash technology out there.  A "fast, easy, free way to design your home" indeed!

Since the application is rather complex and rich, it does take a while to load, and starts you off with instructions on how to begin using it. The application interface has significantly changed over time, and it follows the desktop paradigm more closely now. It features a tool bar including a menu bar on top, panels on the right include the tools and objects you can use in your work. Turn on the fullscreen feature of your browser (usually using the F11 key), and you will barely notice that this is a browser app. In fact the application supports its own fullscreen mode using the fullscreen support available in Flash. However in this fullscreen mode Flash doesn't support keyboard input.

Autodesk Homestyler loading

Getting started screen