Emmanuel's excellent quality and open source code

Even for a non-developer like me, this shines through. Having spec'ed and evaluated quite a few software projects professionally over the years, all I can say is that SH3D could stand up to some very costly and (over)complicated projects.

A phone with a built in laser measure would be a fantastic way to get a plan started! I like it. Currently I’ve been thinking of doing what some other apps do, which is touching your phone along each wall...

Quite amazing. I was not aware of the walk-around-wall-touching technology that seems to exist for both Android and Apple. Love the approach and I surprised with the apparent accuracy.

Still, after a couple of home projects with SH3D, the main challenge is actually getting the measurements right. And nothing can beat a laser measure for accuracy. Now that some of the major manufacturers offer wireless (Bluetooth) data transfer from laser measures, maybe one would be interested in SH3D+Renovations3D as a back-end for data collection? Press an approximate wall location in the app and get exact measurements from the laser? It would increase the value of the laser-tool enormously, so maybe they could contribute to the development cost?

The first "extra" feature will probably be texture import from camera shots.

Impressive if you can get that right. Getting (small 256×256 seamless) textures to look good also takes quite a while. Also, do not forget the various colour-analyzer apps. While not perfect, some of them are really quite good. Automatically getting an approximate colour would also be an interesting feature...

.. wonder if render to photo might be very slow on android.

Possibly, but to some that would not matter. While I think it is super-nice to be able to sketch and edit SH3D files on a hand-held, I agree with Puybaret that "smartphone + your finger will hardly replace the wider screen of a computer + a mouse". Which means you will need to go back to the desktop with the file to edit and render.

I am using too many words here, but the long and short of it is that SH3D really has proved to be a very advanced tool for my projects, and tools that can help with the data collation (e.g. thread 6162) are very interesting. The emphasis for me being data-collation / field tool - not for a limited-screen-hand-held to offer all refined features.

Again, congratulations to eTeks and you. A very interesting development indeed. Wish you the best of luck.

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