You hate your kitchen. You've got a home-improvement loan and a set of plans, but before you start knocking out walls, you want to know whether you’ll like that cabinet over the sink, and if your kitchen table will still fit. Instead of lying awake worrying, you could try MacInteriors, an inexpensive program that lets you visualize your design in three dimensions.
MacInteriors offers five two-dimensional views — a floor plan and four wall views — in which you do the bulk of your work. Using the room-drawing tools and specifying dimensions via dialog boxes, you lay out walls, windows, and floors. Then you furnish the room with objects from libraries (called stationery pads) or use the drawing tools to create your own.
As you work in two dimensions, the program creates a 3-D model of your room. You can easily change your vantage point and field of vision inside the model to explore your new interior. Unlike high-end 3-D CAD and modeling programs, MacInteriors does not aim for photo-realism — it does not simulate light sources, for example, or import textures.
MacInteriors comes with over 100 editable objects such as bookshelves, bidets, and Quadras. You can stretch an end table into a sleeker coffee table, or deform an executive desk into a truly gargantuan power statement. Editable colors and patterns let you roughly simulate surfaces such as wallpaper and flooring. You can create furnishings in the Design mode and add them to the library. You can also assign a dollar value to objects (but not construction costs), and MacInteriors will track your projected expenditures.
MacInteriors is basically a useful program dragged down by its documentation, both on screen and in the manual. Working in three dimensions is not intuitive. If you’re not careful, a door that appears to be right where it belongs in plan view might turn out to be 8 feet off the floor in a wall view, and no dialog box cautions you. Getting objects correctly placed is not impossible, just unduly cumbersome. It would be helpful to be able to select an object and read its dimensions — linear or area — from either an info box or a label. Instead, you must option-click on the ends of each component line and do the math yourself.
Other features that should be intuitive in a program targeted for the casual user aren’t. The tutorial is confusing in many places, and although the illustrations are clearly drawn, you have to constantly leaf through to find them. Useful tools, such as color editing (not covered in the tutorial), get perfunctory treatment in the manual.
Fortunately, Microspot’s customer service is prompt, patient, and helpful, though not toll-free; and in spite of the program’s annoyances, MacInteriors is fun to use once you catch on.
Hanks, Steven. (February 1994). MacInteriors. Macworld. (pg. 83).
Any B&W Mac that can run System 5 or newer will do.
MacInteriors
Icads International Ltd
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
44 / 
2024-06-07 / 
1b6cbde2e258671681dac3c0a06dc715e4eae7b8 / 
/ 
MacInterior-1.0.dsk
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
