Improvements

For starters, we completed a redesign of the entire app. We liked the old design but the layout was constraining for fitting more content on the page. With so many ways to work with your fixtures and finishes, it was hard to give everything enough space on the page. The new layout has a sidebar to the left-hand side of the page and gives you more screen space to work.

What motivated this redesign is we had trouble fitting everything we wanted on the page for our new mood boards! Now, if you visit any room you'll see a new tab for a mood board. This page allows you to layout a grid of all your items. You can lay them out in advance and as you approve certain fixtures or finishes, you will see them populate. This makes it easy to see larger images of all your selections side-by-side.

Right next to mood boards is another new tab called Inspiration Images. You can upload an image now on any room to serve as an inspiration image. We always draw on inspiration from other incredible builders and designers all over the world when we are designing our homes. This makes it easy for us to keep track of and share images that help define the selections we need in space.

Bugfixes

• When you open a drawer, like when viewing an item in a room, the drawer would just appear. But when you closed it, it nicely slid away. Due to some complexities with how it was built, I could never get the animation to work. I finally sat down to fix it and it's beautiful!
• A few file download links would cause you to be trapped viewing a PDF if you were using our progressive web app. We've now fixed these links so this doesn't happen anymore.
• We also cleaned up some fundamental issues with our progressive web app design. I highly recommend adding our app to your home screen. It's not a perfect replacement for a native app but we think it looks pretty good.
• When viewing your library of selections, we display preview images of every item. These images were resized down to 250 x 250 to improve page load speed. This was too small and made the images blurry. We have adjusted this up to 450 x 450.

Whats Next

• Add pricing to the selections library. This might seem simple on the surface but our hope is to provide a lot of depth here. Including price scraping when you import a selection, price history to track how selections change over time, a source so you can easily identify where a price came from, and an easy way to quickly request a price check from a previously identified source.
• Adding a tab on rooms to allow uploading of detailed drawings. We frequently generate plans during construction that are not included in the architectural plans. Things like wall plans or a sketch of how a small detail is done in a room.