We get a lot of positive feedback on the recently improved sharing options like the possibility to export your Floor plan to an image. With a free account you can create PNG-files of 640×480 that can be placed on your own website and users of the PLUS and PRO versions can export to larger resolutions up to 2800×2100 pixels so you can easily add high quality images to printed brochures etc.

Floorplan designs can now also be shown directly on other websites through the widget option also available under the “share” tab. Just copy and paste a little bit of code in your weblog or site and the results of your work will be dynamically showed on your own site.

If you like the fresh page where you can view the lastest public designs by other users then you might like the gadget/widget for your Google homepage that we also added recently. It shows the latest design right on your Google IG page and you can zoom and browse to other recent design.

Although we do our very best to keep our service up and running sometimes things go unexpectedly wrong. During an update we did today we had some problems getting the site back online and this has was the cause of a 45 minutes outage. We still had the connection to the database so users working on a design should have been able to save their designs and also floorplanners widgets were shown properly but still our service was not working as it should be during this time.

It was the first mayor outage we encountered with this server since it came online more then two months ago. Sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused. We are doing our best to find out exactly what went wrong so we can take the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

Molly McDonald has a weblog called DemoGirl where she makes demo movies of software and web applications in which she explain how the interface works and how you get started with that particular tool.

She recently did a cool demo of Floorplanner that is really helpful for new users to see how you can use Floorplanner and how you can share your designs with other people. This demo was also put on YouTube. Check it out…

Today we are happy to introduce 2 new functions in the Floorplanner: Lines & Surfaces. We think that these functions will make it even easier to create more accurate and better looking floorplans.

Line drawing tool
A much requested feature was the ability to draw single walls or lines that weren’t linked to spaces and rooms. For this purpose we added a brand new line tool. With it you can create 3 (for now) types of lines :

Walls: Create single walls. Ceiling height or low wall.

Architectural lines: Use dashed, dotted or other lines to indicate the position of a roof or something else.

Dimension lines: Add auto-measurements or replace the text in a dimension line with your own.

How does it work?
Press the Line-icon in the construction menu and draw your line. Clicking on a line allows you to edit it; the last selected line properties will be used for the next line you draw. Lines can be dragged into position afterwards and will snap to each other. All these lines can be customized in color or thickness and can be easily positioned on your drawings.

Surface drawing tool
Do you need a surface not surrounded by walls, like a garden, or a different carpeting within a larger room? Use the Surface drawing tool. Press the Surface-icon and draw an enclosed area by clicking all the area corners. The corners can be repositioned afterwards and your surfaces can even have curved lines. By clicking on it, surfaces can be edited in the same way as floors in a room.

Doors and Windows
You might notice that the buttons for doors and windows are merged into one. Click on it and a little menu appears that allows you to place a door or a window. Soon we will add more types like French doors and sliding doors.

We hope you find these improvements useful and like to hear from you if you find a bug we missed. In the future we are planning to add more line types and windows. If you have any particular types you would like to see in the Floorplanner, please leave a comment or contact us so we can put it on our list…

We get a lot of valuable user feedback and suggestions to improve our product. By far the most requested feature was the ability to delete a wall. Although this sounds like a small thing to implement, it has caused us a lot of headaches to make this work because of the way spaces are automatically generated and calculated.

Good news! We think we finally nailed the bugger and have a found a working and simple solution to delete a wall. In this post we’ll briefly explain how it works and give some advice on how to use it to get the best results.

So how does it work?
Click on a wall for the properties menu, and in the upper right corner you find the delete icon. It will remove the selected wall and…

1. If this results in creating one big space the two connecting spaces merged together; keeping the settings of one of the two.
2. If this results in an open space it will remove also the space.
3. Did you delete a loose wall, it will have no consequences for the spaces

If you wish to have a floor even if the room is open, you can use the surface drawing tool which we implemented earlier this week. If walls are closed again, a new space will be created inside. And of course, you can always go back one step with undo.

We hope this will solve the problem but we are aware that we may still have missed some bugs. If you find some errors or have any trouble with the new functionality, please don’t hesitate to contact us or post a comment.

Check out this post on the Hewn and Hammered weblog. It made our day

I guarantee you will be as hooked on this as I am. Floorplanner takes those mediocre house-plan / design packages out there (including the really crummy online, browser-specific, super-crashy versions like Home Despot’s) and puts them all to shame. First of all: it works. All the time. In every browser I’ve tried it in. It’s fast, colorful, has an enormous number of colors and patterns available, lots of furniture, easy wall / door / window / angle drawing tools, and it’s just so much darn fun!

Until now there wasn’t a lot of choice in doors and windows that you could use in your floorplan but not anymore.

We’ve just upgraded the doors and windows menu with new elements to choose from like sliding doors, (bi)folding doors, double doors, archways, bay windows, French balconies, garage doors and more.

Please let us know if you think we have missed an essential door or window-type so we can add this to our library in the near future.