Anyone who has laid paving stones knows the frustration: you get to the edges and suddenly half your time goes into cutting. Every cut means wasted material, extra tool wear, and a less clean finish. Version 1.0.8 tackles that problem head-on with two features that make a real difference in practice.
See the color before you buy
The planner now shows eight stone colors right in the pattern step. Grey, anthracite, red, brown, terracotta, sand. Pick one and the canvas updates instantly. It sounds simple, but it changes how you plan: you can match the paving to your house facade or garden wall while the layout is still just pixels on a screen, not bags of concrete on a pallet.
The optimizer: three paths to fewer cuts
Below the pattern selector you will find a new optimization panel. It runs the full tiling and cutting engine dozens of times in the background and reports which settings produce the fewest cut stones.
Optimize joint width sweeps from 2 to 20 mm in half-millimetre steps. A tiny change in gap size can shift the entire grid just enough to avoid cuts at the boundary. The result appears as a bar chart: lower bars mean fewer cuts.
Adjust area (±5%) tests whether making the surface slightly larger or smaller eliminates cuts entirely. Sometimes 20 mm more or less per edge is all it takes for the stones to land perfectly.
Joint + area combined is the heavy hitter. It varies both parameters at once and finds the single best combination in one click. If you are willing to flex on both gap size and exact surface dimensions, this mode will find the sweet spot.
Every bar is clickable
The charts are not just informational. They are interactive. Click any bar to apply that candidate value immediately. Want the second-best option because it uses a more standard joint width? Just click it. The planner updates on the spot.
What else is new
Three additional laying patterns: basket weave, stretcher bond, and diagonal. The sidebar steps are now collapsible to free up canvas space on mobile. German locale defaults to metres. And PatioPlanner is now installable as a PWA: add it to your home screen and use it offline.