Autodesk Project Dragonfly reviewed

Project Dragonfly is a technology preview of CAD on the web from Autodesk that let you do floor planning in your web browser without knowing what CAD is.

In general Project Dragonfly is quite easy to use even though it still lack many things to be a complete product, but it is just an early stage entry level design application just like an alpha or beta.

I first tried with Internet Explorer 8 RC and found that some obvious things were missing. It was the toolbars that did not show up. But it worked better in Chrome and Firefox.

Update a few hours later. IE 8 final version is released and when I tested Dragonfly in it everything worked as expected.

It should be more obvious that if you drag for example a window outside a wall that it is deleted. This seems to not be possible in 3D.

The zoom increment should be smaller when zooming in and out with the wheel in 3D. It would also be great to have a more free 3D orbit functionality to rotate the view.

A basic help with small animations should be provided to explain how move a window up and down respective right and left as well as some of the other features that for a novice might not be so obvious.

As you can see in the animated gif below you need sometimes to try several times to find where to click.

 

More content and more dynamic content both when it comes to size and colors would be useful.

Anyone compared it to floor planner? Here is a demo so you can try it hands-on. A quick look at it and it seem to be more complete. You can for example add room names and it shows the room area. Here is a screenshot from their weblog.

Both solutions requires Adobe Flash Player.