The editor
Draw it the way you sketch it. Then stand it up.
Line, curve and freehand on a plan grid. What you draw becomes a measured shape you can orbit, light at any hour of the day, and sit on ground that already has the house on it.
Drawing
Start with a line, not a template
Most pool software makes you pick a shape from a catalogue and then argue with it. Here the first thing you do is draw, and the catalogue is there for the parts you would rather not draw twice.
Line, curve, freehand
Click each corner, or drag and let it snap. Shift locks a segment horizontal, vertical or to 45 degrees; alt steps off the grid for one point. End near where you started and the path closes into an outline with an area.
Then stand it up
Turn what you drew into a pool, a deck, a lanai or a grass area. The outline becomes the footprint. Nothing gets redrawn, and the arc you drew stays an arc all the way to the construction sheet.
Seventy-five stencils
Pool shapes, interior features, deck and house, construction symbols, water and outdoor. Seventeen pool shapes among them, from a standard rectangle to a freeform kidney with a spa.
Drop it in and it fits
Drag an object over a space you have already drawn and the space lights up. Let go and the object sizes itself to what it landed in, rather than to a default nobody chose.
Select, group, lock, hide
The things you expect from a drawing tool, on the objects you drew. Everything is on a layer tree you can work down when the yard gets busy.
Comments on the drawing
Leave the note on the thing it is about, where the person who has to act on it will find it. Comments stay in the editor and never appear on a customer document.
Views
One scene, three ways to look at it
Plan, section and perspective are the same scene under a different camera. There is no second renderer, so the plan and the 3D cannot drift apart.
Orbit it. The customer sees the yard from where they will stand in it, not from a fixed three-quarter view.
Sunrise to sunset on a slider. Move the sun through the day and watch where the shade actually lands, which is the question every customer asks about the seating.
The ground is part of the design. Existing grade and finished grade are both on the drawing. Cut and fill are reported apart and never netted against each other, because you pay to haul one and pay again to bring in the other.
The house is on the drawing. So setbacks are measured from a wall that exists, and the lot line is a line rather than an assumption.
Everything in inches, under the hood. Type a dimension in whatever unit you think in and it comes back in the unit you typed.
Measurement
Nobody measures the drawing
Area, perimeter, volume, deck area, coping linear feet and the count of every feature come off the geometry, and they are recomputed the moment the geometry changes. There is no takeoff step, because there is nothing to take off.
Surface area and perimeter
From the outline itself, including the curved parts. Widen the pool by a foot and both move before you let go of the handle.
Volume in gallons
From the footprint and the depth profile you set, shallow end to deep end, rather than from an average somebody guessed.
Deck, coping, features
Deck area by material, coping by the linear foot, and a count of every light, jet, drain and bench on the drawing.
Earthwork by the yard
Cut and fill volumes from the difference between existing and finished grade, in the cubic yards an excavator is actually billed in.
Versions
Draw three, sell one
Nobody agrees on the first design. A job holds up to forty of them, side by side, each with its own drawing and its own total.
Every design carries its price. So the conversation is about the difference between forty-six thousand and fifty-eight, rather than about which drawing was which.
One of them is active. Activate a design and it becomes the drawing the quote, the checklist and every export read. The others sit on the rack untouched.
Name them like a person would. "Scheme B, with the spa" beats a timestamp when you open the job again in three weeks.