Getting started

Install Kaleidoscope Plan, find your way around the editor, and draw your first room.

Welcome to Kaleidoscope Plan. This guide gets you from a blank canvas to your first finished room, and points you to everything else in the user guide.

Requirements

Kaleidoscope Plan runs natively on:

Everything runs on-device. There is no account to create and nothing is uploaded.

The three tabs

The app opens to a simple shell with three tabs:

• Projects, your jobs. A project groups related drawings, scans, surveys and engines.
• Library, a flat, filterable view of every drawing, scan and engine across all your projects, plus your saved elements.
• Settings, units, styles, region and app preferences (see Settings).

Create a project, then open or add a drawing inside it to start editing.

Anatomy of the editor

When you open a drawing you get the canvas and a floating tool palette:

• Canvas, pan, pinch and zoom; the plan keeps its own sheet style (paper white, or blueprint if you prefer) instead of following dark mode. See Canvas & navigation.
• Tool palette, a bubble on iPhone, a labelled rail on iPad and Mac. The core tools have shortcuts (⌘1–⌘9) on Mac and on an iPad with a keyboard - see Keyboard shortcuts.
• Selection, tap to select, then move, rotate and scale with handles and pills. See Editing & selection.
• Undo / redo, ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z, or the on-screen buttons.

Draw your first room

1. Create a project and add a new drawing.
2. Choose the Room tool. A small palette appears with a Pointer plus Box, Box Set and Shapes drawing tools. Pick Box and drag to rubber-band a room of any size, or just tap to drop a default 3 m × 3 m room. (The first time you open an empty drawing, a short “Draw your first room” card points the way.)
3. Each drawing tool is one-shot: after you draw, you’re back on the Pointer, so you can pan around and position your rooms, tap a room to select it, then drag, rotate, flip or delete it - or tap its name label to rename it. To draw another room, pick a drawing tool again: Box Set asks for a width × height, and Shapes offers rectangle, L, U and T outlines.
4. To adjust walls, select a room and tap Walls on the Room palette. Tap a wall to select it, drag it to move it, or use the wall actions: Line draws a single wall, and the rest split, extrude, move, fuse, delete, square up or set an angle. Tap empty space to deselect, and Back to return to the Room tool.
5. Add a door and a window: pick the tool, then tap a wall (see Doors, windows & openings).
6. Drop in furniture and fittings, then tidy up.

Tip: prefer to start from reality? Scan the room with LiDAR instead, see Scanning with LiDAR.

Saving your work

Use Save to write your changes to the drawing. You don’t have to worry about losing work in between: while a drawing is open the app quietly autosaves in the background, so if it’s ever killed mid-edit - a crash, a force-quit, or running out of memory - the next time you open that drawing it offers to recover your unsaved changes. Recover to pick up exactly where you left off, or discard to go back to your last manual Save.

Where to next

• Canvas & navigation and Editing & selection, master the editor.
• Rooms & walls, the core of every drawing.
• Engines, layer 3D, fire safety, security, WiFi, network and marketing tools on top.
• Exporting & sharing, get a PDF, PNG or CSV out.