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 and engines.
• Library — a flat, filterable view of every drawing and scan 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 always renders on a paper-white sheet, even in dark mode. See Canvas & navigation.
• Tool palette — a bubble on iPhone, a labelled rail on iPad and Mac. Each tool has a keyboard shortcut on Mac (⌘1–⌘9).
• 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 wall tool and trace the room outline; walls snap to a grid and to each other.
3. Close the loop to form a room — its area and name appear at the centre.
4. Add a door and a window by tapping a wall (see Doors, windows & openings).
5. Drop in furniture and fittings, then tidy up.

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

Where to next

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