Redstart Software — Tools for Garden Design

We have posted the first development build of GardenSketch to the download page. Development builds are experimental versions of GardenSketch. These builds are useful in order to see and comment on new features, and contain fixes for bugs in the latest beta or release version. However, they have not undergone extensive testing, so you should expect other problems and issues. Please let us know what you think.

We have started a page where you can tell us the city and country where you live using Frappr.com. This information will help us prioritize the plants to add and languages to support.

Announcing the release of beta5 of Redstart GardenSketch.

Beta 5 adds significant new features and resolves many issues, including:

New Features

• Built as a universal binary
• GardenSketch now displays most non-plant items in color, for drawing styles which include color.
• Added more non-plant items
• Added menus of common plants, making it even easier to plants. The menus include plants popular many regions. Since GardenSketch is open source software, you can help add popular plants for your region.
• Stays on the current drawing tool after an operation
• Grouped drawing, placement, and planting bed tools with the shape tools
• Added Select All for plan elements
• Enhanced the reference image feature (old aerial photo) to import a scale drawings
• Added keyboard shortcuts for zoom in and zoom out
• Rearrange menus in active material palette to be set top-down
• Added a “ShoppingList” report for plants to purchase.
  • You can create the list for one or for all vendors
  • You can create list for one garden plot, or the entire landscape
  • You can include volume calculations for mulch
  • You can display pictures of the plants in the list
  • You can include annuals to repurchase for next year
• Made many performance improvements
• Changed to a new file format
  • can include background pictures in the project
  • Saves space and load time
  • Option to use standard XML
• Changed palette icons to 32×32
• Added more plants
• Added more pictures
• Made the ActiveMaterial palette wider, in order to make pictures easier to see.
• Added a new new plant style where plants drawings grow and shrink
• Added more backdrop materials (dirt, bark mulch, white)
• Change some of the icons

Defects Fixed

• Creating a new plant without height or spread displayed garbage in the height and spread fields.
• The construction draw style showed non-plant rotated incorrectly.
• Selecting “in this plot” after adding hardscape didn’t clear text or drawing.
• Plants could sometimes show up with a spread equal to their height. This was most noticeable with tall thin plants like sunflower.
• Plants may have been looked up incorrectly by name.
• Adding plant with identical variety twice in the same row made two identical materials
• Couldn’t drop mulch on an area covered by a plant radius
• Items on alternate plots didn’t show up in list view
• Entering 2′3cm incorrectly set the field to 20″
• Entering range as 2-3′ should have been the same as 2′ to 3′ (2″ to 3′ should still work)
• Entering length or maxLength with unnamed plant silently failed
• There was a problem clicking on a picture column when used on multi-year lists
• Hyperlink text color didn’t change when clicked
• Selecting alternate picture didn’t change the dialog.
• Two pastes in a row on picture popup doesn’t create two entries on the plant.
• If entering name and variant on an unknown quantity as one string, didn’t enter data into variety column
• Crash opening find dialog with no document open
• Couldn’t redo moving endpoints on an arc
• Couldn’t do planChange on more than one element
• Having 2 elements selected while dragging would sometimes causes them to jump when moving elements
• When alternate move elements and adding attached dimensions, sometimes undo steps seem to be lost
• Selecting two elements and dragging deselected only one item
• The delete key didn’t delete plan elements
• Didn’t accept copy of item from finder (select jpeg icon in finder, copy)
• Non-plant items weren’t getting into the “All in document” menu
• Used to enable tools which were not valid for the active material (Arc should not have enabled for planting bed)
• Fixed some application waits (spinning beachball cursor)
• undo /redo resize of title failed
• Changing path width should have affected the plant count in the GetInfo window.
• keystrokes don’t make it through to tools unless a plant had been added to the canvas
• Delete key doesn’t work for non-material element types
• Fill a group, then select. FIll disappears. Save & re-open, fill show until selected again.
• There was an error using info tool on group
• Some plant entries were missing height and/or width.
• There were problems selecting small non-plant items (ex: wall) (Allow click ‘n’ pixels away from a non-plant item)
• Rectangle paths would not resize correctly after save/restore
• Dropping turf over bench caused the bench to disappear. GardenSketch now enforces ordering of different types of elements
• Backdrops used to show up in monochrome drawing styles
• Info tooltip left up when window closed, or possibly just when tool switched, which could cause a crash.
• Text & Title boxes drawn incorrectly for sizes smaller than the rounded corner radius
• Don’t allow changing the border style if the box is tool small.
• Don’t display title GetInfo for text boxes
• Problems using some characters in document properties
• Canonical name cell can be too short (not taking italics and font into account)

Before deciding on plans for your garden, it’s useful to be able to draw the boundaries of the garden so that you can see how much space it available. In this entry, I’ll describe a method which works for totally irregular garden shapes.

1. Edit the garden plot size to a rectangle which is somewhat larger than the garden.
2. Measure the size of the garden along its longest point. Create a dimension line the size of the measured line.
3. At regular intervals, measure in both directions away from the original line. It’s best to use the intervals of the grid on GardenSketch so that you can use the grid to align the measurements at right angles.
4. Click the paint tool and the freehand shape tool, and draw a line around the outside of the dimension lines. If you need to draw the shape in multiple lines, then you can use the “Combine” menu item to combine the lines into one shape.
5. Drag the shape to its final location and erase the dimension lines.

GardenSketch beta 5 will have a new feature to make it easier to choose plants which are common to your region. I’ve added some plants for my local region, and for regions where customers have requested plants. To see the current list for your region, visit Common Plants for Different Regions.

You can edit any list to add or remove plants (it’s a wiki). Below are pictures of the new feature in a development build.

Beta 4 announcement
September 28th, 2006

Announcing the release of beta4 of Redstart GardenSketch.

Beta 3 adds online help.

GardenSketch is an open-source project with many possible ways to help. You can:

1. Provide suggestions and comments.
2. Give us permission to reference or keep a copy of your plant pictures for use by GardenSketch users. All pictures will be attributed as you wish (usually by site and photographer).
3. Supply data about plants (height, spread, flower color, etc…). All data will be attributed as you wish.
4. Donate funds to GardenSketch at: sourceforge.net.
5. Supply plan drawings of garden furniture and hardscape in SVG format. We can mail you a document describing the specifics of formatting a drawing for GardenSketch.
6. Help develop the program (It’s written in C++).
7. Become an official tester.

By being a contributer, you can make GardenSketch better fit your own needs. If you wish, you can also be named in “About GardenSketch…” dialog.

Jeff Bedell
Redstart Software

[posted with ecto]

Announcing the release of beta3 of Redstart GardenSketch.

Beta 3 adds significant new features and resolves a number of issues, including:

• Plant images will be automatically downloaded from the internet when the plant is first viewed. GardenSketch currently handles 226 pictures for 194 selected plants, with more to come
• A new plant picture window with larger pictures, alternate pictures, and the capability to add data to pictures.
• Enlarged pictures in the GetInfo window and the palette
• Default picture displayed in the palette when loading the plant by name
• A new plant aging control, to show how plants will look as the garden grows.
• An improved search dialog.
• Over 270 new plants in the database.
• Improved document opening speed for large projects.
• In GetInfo window, changing the spacing of existing plants now updates the # of plants listed
• Planting beds in freehand shapes correctly fill to the edges with no large gaps in the platings .
• Fixed problem setting source column in SourceDatabase window
• Fixed handling of unknown names and varieties
• An ‘add variety’ menu on the list views.
• All variety rows are automatically updated when data is added to the species
• Displays a smaller color square when a variety color is assumed based upon the species
• Allows for different values in fields for varieties from species
• Mature plant size represented by a dashed circle instead of a solid circle.
• improved formatting of the botanical name