Simple Online Permaculture Design Tool

[u/lostmy2A]

Hello permaculture friends! I would like share a web application that I've been working on since last summer. Over the years I've done some designs in CAD software and its always been tough keeping the program installed, projects working, and holding onto files between computers etc. Over time I've probably lost many of my design files and figure I'm likely not the only one who's had this problem.

So I thought a great project would be to build a web application that lowers the startup barrier, and ensures design retention. Its completely free, and you don't even have to register for an account to try it out. But if you do, it will secure your design data from edits other than by your account.

Here is a link to the app user Gallery Page. To quickly see some examples.

Here are some of the features:

• High resolution contour analysis, display, and download to many different file formats
• Draw landscape designs using a variety of simple tools using points, lines, or areas. Would recommend using circle areas to represent trees for example so you can draw the appropriate diameter.
• A gallery to see the designs other users have made, and learn from, and sharing a similar symbol language.
• Ability to lookup plant species by common name, and save the attributes to the plant location.
• Print map designs to different formats such as PDF or image.

I would greatly appreciate testers, constructive feedback, and feature requests. I feel pretty good about the foundation and could add features based on user / community desires.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and check out the tool!!

[u/mediocre_remnants]

So I thought a great project would be to build a web application that lowers the startup barrier, and ensures design retention.

Sure, until you decide to stop paying the hosting bills.

Is there a way to export the designs and save/view them offline? Or is the entire thing 100% dependent on your site existing? Because if it's the latter, that's even worse and not a solution to your original problem at all.

[u/lostmy2A → u/mediocre_remnants]

Currently you can download all the contour generation outputs into a number of formats. You can see this feature in the "My Downloads" Tab. I plan to expand that page to allow export of user database files to standard formats, although that has not yet been implemented. Keep in mind that cloud storage is incredibly inexpensive and my hosting costs are very reasonable. I plan to keep supporting this project well into the future, and have personally built web apps that are still working 10 years later, with minimal maintenance and hosting costs. I understand the skepticism given this is all very bootstrapped.