Arti — the floor plan editor for macOS

01The context

Arti came out of a renovation. I wanted to know whether a two-metre sofa would fit in a living room before ordering it, and I found only two kinds of tool: CAD software that expects training, and browser toys that want an email address before they will let you draw a wall. Nothing in between.

Arti is the thing that was missing. You draw a room by dragging, you place doors and windows — they cut real openings, with the swing drawn the right way round — you furnish from a catalogue of 244 pieces at real dimensions, then you switch to 3D and walk the result at eye level. The same plan, two ways of looking at it, nothing re-entered.

The decision that shaped everything was to keep it local. No account, no sign-up, no server: the app opens on an empty plan and works with no connection at all, on a plane or in an empty house with no signal. Your plans live in a single file on your Mac. Nothing leaves, so nothing can leak, and the privacy policy fits on one page because there is almost nothing to declare.

02The product

The export is the deliverable: a dimensioned image, every room labelled with its measurements and its area, legible on a phone, ready to send to a builder or an estate agent. What the software is not, it also says: it draws the dimensions you type, it checks no building regulation, and its areas are not a legally valid statement of floor space. A plan is for thinking and communicating, not for certifying.

Arti also runs in a browser — the same application compiled for the web, not a cut-down demo. That port meant solving problems the Mac never poses: the cross-origin isolation a browser demands before it grants fast storage, the compression of a large bundle, and a crash-reporting system written from scratch because the usual tool simply has no web implementation.

The site carries the app: twenty-four pages in French and English, twelve of them guides answering questions people actually ask — how to measure a room, what clearance to leave around a bed, the standard dimensions of all 244 pieces in the catalogue. Writing those pages changed the app: the cap on floors per plan, for one, was settled only after it had to be explained in writing.

03The outcome

Designed, built, translated and maintained by Invent Better. Free, no in-app purchases, at artiplans.com.