George59, be aware that measures tolerance in buildings are quite high. In my own home, I discovered that some rooms weren't actually as rectangular as expected in the plan. So, drawing walls upon a fuzzy scanned image should probably give not so bad results!

So, how do you design a room with 1m long walls on all four sides, one of them is 30cm wide, the other one is 40cm, and the other two are 10cm wide each and at the end the inner size of the room is 1m x 1m and the auto display of the area shows 1m2?

Just edit the coordinates and thickness of the walls afterwards with their modification dialog. Not fun to do, but please keep in mind that the recommended and fastest way to create a plan with Sweet Home 3D is to import a background image, draw walls upon it, change their thickness, and finally draw the rooms.

About the selection color under Windows XP, check the selected Color scheme in Appearance tab of Windows Display properties (see also here). The blue default scheme doesn't give so dark color on my computer.

I do like the space bar + mouse click&hold way of dragging. Shift+ or Ctrl+ could have also be used since they don't have any function in the same situation, but it is there.

Sorry to say that, but you're wrong: Shift is used for multiple selection and Ctrl key is used for duplication. By the way, using the space bar to pan in the plan is found in some other 2D drawing software too.

For zooming with keyboard instead of Ctrl-k I'd recommend the widely known Ctrl-+ or Ctrl-- as it is used in Internet browsers like Firefox.

I never succeeded to may Ctrl-+ or Ctrl-- shortcuts work under Windows. Maybe I should try again. Note that even if I also prefer those shortcuts, they are not so easy to use on some foreign keyboards where the + key requires to press the Shift key.

what is your preferred OS, MAC or Windows?

I work under Mac OS X because I like it but before all, it allows me to test Sweet Home 3D under that system, Windows and Linux with only one computer.


Ceciliabr, magnetism and align is supposed to work the same way on all operating systems, even if shortcut keys are different.
About the video, zooming with the Ctrl or cmd key doesn't give unpredictable results, it's just that zooming in or out won't change the origin of the plan. It could be programmed an other way, but I'm not sure it could be such a good idea. Keep in mind that the plan pane and its scroll bars work with a 2D logic, which is different from the 3D logic.
The way you show how to align objects in your video is unfortunately not very realistic, because the need to align side by side the exact same objects 2 or more times doesn't happen so often. That doesn't remove the interest of the Furniture > Align side by side menu item (if it wasn't so interesting, I wouldn't have created a shortcut for it!) and I guess you demonstrate it this way to create faster the video, but when you need to align different kind of objects you can also drag and drop then directly side by side along a wall simply using the magnetism I described in my previous message.