This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations.
Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.
I don't think you're giving his argument enough credit. Since he's a pro, he probably knows what he's talking about.
I've tried Magic-Plan, and yeah, it was frustrating and too inaccurate to be useful.
Start at the use case: Why would you need this? As a home-owner who's done it, I can't think of any except remodeling. Wether you're replacing the carpet, getting rid of a half-wall, putting in a new beam, measuring out a bathroom for a remodel, you need good, accurate measurements for this stuff.
If just eyeballing it was good enough you wouldn't need the tool in the first place. Guess. Look at your 1' floor tiles, count 'em, and you've got a probably better read on everything.
What would've really helped me out when doing this was a great, simple to use tool to help me build floor plans. Most of what I found on the App Store for the iPad was pretty shoddy, or just difficult to use effectively. Like I want snap-to-grid. But once I put a wall in the exact location I want the option to lock position. Or lock length.
So I dunno. I feel like he/she has a point. When approaching this problem, and needing to make a compromise, you don't compromise on accuracy or you've made your tool irrelevant. If they'd just focused on a really great floor planning tool that would have been the better compromise.
That said I haven't tried it yet, so maybe that's there. I'm gonna give it a shot.
How to start a startup: Find a process that requires tedious work with lots of different tools, and make that process simpler and easier. Start with something that works well enough to be of value to some people, and improve until the old process is laughably complex.
For only $15 ? I know a few people doing CAAD technical drawing, all day long. Often just recreating the sketches the structural engineer draw on a piece of paper.
Are you offering to do that manually (prolly outsourcing) ? You know, those paper drawings aren't 4 lines with 2 measurements :-)
Or are you looking into automating that ? That would be a very interesting side-project ... but that would be really hard to do character recog. on hand-written numbers that are all over the place :-/
This argument depends on specifics, not the overall form. Just because another argument with a similar form was made and it was wrong doesn't mean anything about this one.
No, absolutely nobody ever said that. The only con of a laser measure is the price (compared to a foldable analog one), but apart from that (and for the purpose of measuring rooms and buildings), a laser measure is superior in every way.
You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in what you have measured. Obviously laser theodolites can solve these problems but are about 1000 times more expensive than a reel tape.
It could send a photograph of a floorplan, but it wouldn't be editable unless there's some interpolation of the image you photograph. When your original floorplan begins in digital form, it's more-flexible for editing.
