Filed under: Design, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Social Software, Unix
MyDesignIn: Social home renovations
by Ryan Sullivan Feb 4th 2007
Hold off on calling up that architect before you start your next kitchen renovation, and save the gas of having to drive over to The Home Depot to talk to a design consultant. Your first stop should be MyDesignIn. Now in public beta, MyDesignIn takes renovation and redesign to the next level: online social planning.
The way MyDesignIn works is you go around the Internet and start "collecting" different products that you like. With my test I did a Target run and picked out a couple things really quick. When you find something that you like, you then add the item to your design. You then add all of the information about the product in tabular form for the 2D representation of that product. After you have all of your items bookmarked in the system, you then create the room you wish to put them into. It is a pretty elaborate design model that they have in MyDesignIn. You can create multiple rooms and have them saved as their own file, or you can create one whole floor of your home (to scale) and save that as well. Once your room is done, just drag and drop your products into place from the side bar that has all of your bookmarked products in it. The design of the room/floor also includes dimensions for everything that is not the products that you put in. For example, if you have a wall with a window in it, there will be dimensions for the overall wall as well as dimensions from the corner to the window's edge on both sides of the window and then a dimension for the window itself. But there are not any dimensions for product placement within the room.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
