Yard Planner app for iPhone and iPad


4.2 ( 5392 ratings )
Lifestyle Education
Developer: Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio, Inc.
2.99 USD
Current version: 3.6.1, last update: 3 months ago
First release : 01 Jun 2011
App size: 760.8 Mb

YARD PLANNER is a simple drag-and-drop 2D landscape design app with all the tools you need to mock up your property, create new designs, and share them with friends and family.
YARD PLANNER is ideal for homeowners who want to try out fresh ideas for their yard. Useful for landscape professionals to share designs with clients and contractors. Also perfect for children and adults alike to exercise their imagination and creativity!
Use YARD PLANNER to select and place over 800 beautiful hand-drawn elements including trees, gardens, pools, patios, hammocks, driveways, houses and sheds, solar panels, and just about anything you might want for your property–even parties and weddings!
Features include:
• Sample designs to inspire or get you started
• Simple drag-and-drop functionality
• 34 palettes (800+ hand-drawn elements) to create your landscape design layout
• Resize, Rotate, Undo/Redo, Duplicate, Flip, Group
• Rotate elements with “Snap to 90” or turn off to rotate more precisely
• Snap to grid (elements stick to a re-sizeable grid of guidelines, turn on/off in Settings)
• Rulers (visible at edges of design; zoom in to the single unit; user selects feet/meters; can be turned on/off)
• Choose from 15 different background colors
• Sketch Tool (allows users to draw garden beds and other free-form shapes with an eraser and brushes of different colors, widths and opacity)
• Map Tool (This highly accurate mapping tool based on Google Maps allows you to drop pins at the corners of your property and import the map image with measurements into the app as a background.)
• North arrow (appears with Map Tool)
• Site Analysis palettes to mark the locations of your site’s utilities and light and moisture conditions
• Notes (allows users to tag elements in their designs with typed comments or descriptions)
• Light/Dark mode (changes Note tags and North arrow from white to black for visibility against light backgrounds.)
• Animated Figures (a palette of animated elements—a person, dog, cat, bird, and car—that move through your design on a looped or repeating path, adjustable speed, play and stop animation)
• Import a Photo as a background (useful for importing a digital image of your property plan)
• Create different Layers of elements in your design. Add, delete, rename layers, make each layer visible/invisible, lock/unlock for editing, and reorder layer position.
• In-app step-by-step guide to creating your Property Plan.
• Designs automatically save to the app’s Saved Designs gallery
• Share designs on social media
• Email an editable design so friends can edit one another’s designs and email them back and forth

***As featured in The New York Times, Fox News, USA Today, Gardenista, and more.

“Home Outside allows you to create intricate and varied landscapes…And when you’re finished designing your yard or indulging in a little dreamscaping, you can email results to friend.” –Kate Murphy, The New York Times

“The app gives you drag and drop tools to create a garden design idiosyncratic to your garden [and] allows you to choose hardscape materials, design paths and patios, and arrange furniture in your outdoor space.” –Dalilah Arja, Gardenista

“I can’t imagine a designer who wouldn’t want to have this on their phone or tablet. I’ve tried this app … it’s a great tool for a ‘quickie’ design that you can show clients … and then refine as you like.” –Jane Berger, Garden Design Online

Pros and cons of Yard Planner app for iPhone and iPad

Yard Planner app good for

Being able to rethink my backyard space over and over endlessly using this app is lots of fun!
Much better map resolution in this version! I know it’s still limited to Google Earth’s available images, but my property is now clearer. My yard has a lot of tree cover so the Google map doesn’t show every detail of my property, but I turned the map layer off and manually added those details. I now have a very useful base map of my whole yard. Right now I’m designing new flower beds, herb gardens, and a water feature to install next spring. With a combination of structures and basic shapes, I can lay out my house and barn exactly to scale. I like using the Grow Veg app to plan out my veg garden, and then using this app for designing my whole property. I haven’t found any other app that lets me do this.
Ive had a lot of fun playing with this app and moving things around. Lots can be done with the free version. I know when we get to fixing up the yard, it will be great. Fun app, beautiful drawings and colors. Easy to use!
My husband and I have a small yard in front of our home in the city. It was in desperate need of an overhaul. Not having any design or garden experience, we had no clue where to start. I did a quick search around and found this app--it was a huge help to us! We were able to recreate our house and yard and come up with a beautiful new design, which we were then able to plant ourselves one weekend. The drawings are great and the interface is really fun to use. Its like a design game! Our front yard was totally transformed and Im so glad we found this app. We plan to use it again when were ready to tackle our backyard!
Im not a skilled designer or very good at gardening, but this app is great. It has a wide variety of beautifully designed elements to mix and match... Its great for imagining what to do with our little plot of land in the city. I use InDesign at work and it has all the functionality I need to easily design a landscape (Id say its much more intuitive too!). They recently added a wedding palette, which Ive been using to try different configurations for our upcoming ceremony and reception. Its accurate enough that I can figure out the size of tent Ill need to fit 150 people. So helpful! As for the people who complained about the in-app purchases, thats only for a few palettes. You can do a lot for free!
This app has great features that let you use a real map to get the shape of your property. It can be hard to use and the app does need work. Make sure your save your progress from time to time because I had it mess up and jumble my layout. But free is free

Some bad moments

No possibility to resize elements you put in tour design. No use for design.
Interesting concept, but fiddly to operate and hard to manipulate the limited number of choices or to get a clear idea of scale. Trees get lost under patios, flower beds refuse to turn or shrink, things disappear for no reason.
I wish I could draw on it rather than just using the symbols that it comes with. Id rather just draw using my other app.
Save your money. Poor graphics, hard to use.... A joke really.
When I first downloaded the app I was very happy with it. Unfortunately after I spent many hours creating my yard plan the app started to freeze and loose my work. Very disappointed.
Not bad, however it seems to glitch sometimes. Saves a design (zoomed in & cant retrieve the whole picture).

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