|
The Tucson Gardener |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In the Garden Calendar
Local Garden Links
You're visiting Tucsongardener.com
|
Gardening Software
Review Broderbund's™ 3D Home Landscape Designer 4.0 is a new entry (spring 2002) into the home landscape software market. It's suggested retail price is $39.99 and Broderbund™ has a satisfaction guarantee policy. You can return the product and Broderbund™ will exchange it for another of their software titles or refund your purchase price if you included your store receipt or purchase directly from Broderbund™. You'll have 90 days to get your money back.
Broderbund™ seems confident their landscaping software is a useful
product. And it may be for many basic garden landscape projects and you plan
on using plants that are included in the software's plant encyclopedia. If
that's all you want then the software may help you to get an idea of what
your completed landscape project might look like.
What you get for your purchase price is a short, easy to read manual that needs an index and one CD-ROM. The software will let you design your landscape and view it in two-dimensional or three -dimensional views. There is also a limited plant encyclopedia that will help you to select plants specific for your growing conditions. For the Tucson area there were listings for acacias, agave, yuccas, cassias, prickly pear, the saguaro and other cacti along with other suitable plants. The saguaro and prickly pear did not show in 3D view. The biggest draw back is for those that want to see actual representations of plants they would use in their garden in the 3D view. How well does it work?
Once you set up your landscape boundaries (which I never did master) and a grid to give you an indication of space between hardscape and plants, it's just a matter or selecting from the toolbars what you want to place on your plan. You may start with a house whether you use a wizard to help design one or take what's offered. You can change things by clicking on the object and then adjusting the object's properties. There are plenty of objects to add to the landscape your designing whether it's a SUV on the driveway, a potted plant on the patio, brick wall, picket fence, gate or low wattage lighting along a flagstone path. You can also have a night time view in the two-dimensional view which will give you an indication of how well your lighting works. Plants are added by looking through the plant encyclopedia and clicking on your zone and then selecting from deciduous trees, conifers, bushes, flowers, palms, cactus, vegetables, orchids, etc. (I'm not sure why there is a selection for orchids. I think a groundcover choice would be far more usable in designing a landscape.) That's where I ran into some bugs on the Windows XP machine I used. Some of the selections (rollovers) weren't correct on the menu every time and I found it a bit distracting. You can narrow your plant selections by selecting the soil, watering, light requirements and climate zone so you don't have to look through the entire plant encyclopedia. You also have a choice of searching the database using the common or scientific plant name. The search bar could have been labeled and positioned better.
Since I couldn't find the actual plants I wanted in my landscape
in the 7500 plant database I
looked for plant shapes that would give me somewhat of a representation of
the growth pattern I wanted.
Where the real fun comes is placing the cameras for the 3D viewing of your
landscape or the wandering through the landscape to see what you've
created. On my computer it worked quite well but I have a fast 2 GHz chip
and 512MB of RAM. The lag in operation came when the software read from the
CD-ROM. I also tried to look at a 3D plan at full screen and that
really rattled the monitor. The keyboard's escape key put things back to normal
and I didn't try that again.
Who
should buy this software?
Would I recommend the software?
The program isn't bug free and the plant selection isn't very good for all planting zones. There were no mesquites, palo verdes, or common lantana in the database. There's also a lot of unnecessary "fluff" in the software package. Do you really need to be able to change the way the sky looks in the background? (Ten sky choices.) In Tucson, sky blue will work just fine. You can add all kinds of things to your landscapes including horses, pigs, sheep, cars, even boats but there were no hoses or hose bibs to add. I don't remember any sprinkler, or automatic watering systems or even electrical boxes. I had to design the in ground swimming pool from scratch and I would have liked to add an above ground spa. It's possible these things and more plants will be available as downloads from Broderbund™ at a later date but there were no downloads in June, 2002. The garden tools and month by month plant care seemed a bit trivial for the typical gardener and I doubt the beginning gardener should be using this landscape package at all. You might be better off purchasing a good book with illustrations and growing conditions for plants specific to your area. Especially in Tucson. Also, I must admit I was truly disappointed with the software when playing the garden game that tested my plant knowledge and it claimed my answer was wrong when I know it was correct. But then this is a modestly priced software package and it certainly isn't going to do everything for everybody at its $39.99 price. So, if you like to play with new software because you have the time and patience then by all means try it. There's even a setting for those once famous cardboard, two different color lens 3D movie theater glasses. I didn't happen to have any stuck away in a drawer and none came with the software package. (Who thinks of these things? Home gardeners and professional landscapers - I don't think so. Maybe marketing people and software engineers that don't really understand gardeners and gardening.) As far as the search for inexpensive landscape planning software that's really useful to Tucson's gardeners -- I'm still looking. (2002) |
||||||||||||||||||||||
