We've given the Layout Designer a serious upgrade. The goal was simple: make it feel less like a list with a canvas attached, and more like a proper garden-planning workspace you can actually use when you're trying to understand a site, place beds, and remember what the physical garden looks like.
The biggest improvement is spatial clarity. The designer now opens as a proper two-column workspace, with the inventory of beds and objects on the left and a cleaner, more legible planning field on the right. The ruler, north compass, and zoom controls sound small on paper, but together they make the designer feel anchored. You can orient yourself quickly, understand scale, and work comfortably across small courtyards or larger productive gardens.
We also reworked how beds look on the canvas. Raised beds, round tanks, borders, and in-ground areas now read differently, which makes a mixed garden easier to scan at a glance. Active plantings show as markers inside a bed rather than staying hidden in the sidebar, so the plan starts to communicate not just where the bed is, but how alive that part of the garden currently is.
- Beds were visible, but the workspace felt flat
- Little visual separation between different bed types
- No real structural context around the beds
- The map answered "what exists" better than "what this place feels like"
- The canvas has scale, orientation, and a cleaner planning surface
- Built beds, round tanks, borders, and in-ground areas read differently
- Objects give the beds real context inside the site
- The plan is much closer to the physical garden you walk through
The new objects layer is the practical heart of this update. Beds almost never exist in a vacuum. There is a fence that limits access. A tank that casts a shadow. A path you always step through. A shed that makes one corner awkward. By letting those elements sit beside the beds on the same map, the designer becomes more useful for real decisions: where to place a new bed, which edge is best for a climber, whether a winter crop is actually in the shade, and how much working room you really have.
That last point matters. We have been careful to keep this upgrade migration-safe. Existing bed data is preserved, and structural objects are stored separately from bed segments rather than being jammed into the same layer. That separation gives us a better foundation for what comes next without risking the planting history that already makes MyPlot valuable.
This release does not try to turn MyPlot into a landscape CAD package. It is still intentionally lightweight. But it now does a much better job of solving the real problem: giving every planting a believable home inside a recognisable garden, so your records, planning, and seasonal decisions all stay grounded in the place you actually grow.