We spend most of our time working on Floorplanner.com, adding furniture elements and floors, fixing little bugs and implementing new functionality. It’s really rewarding as your feedback and the floorplans you are making give us a lot of motivation. But sometimes we feel the need to spend a bit of our time to work on something completely different. Therefore we have a thing we call our “Pet Projects” these projects are ideas that live within our team and that we all find interesting enough to spend some of our time and energy to bring these ideas to reality. Earlier this year we launched the site Superuse.org. This website allows people to show innovative examples of recycling and last week we launched our latest Pet project: Tjoon.com

What is Tjoon?

Tjoon.com makes it really easy to create split screen videos online by just using your webcam. Until now you needed special movie editing software to create those movies but not anymore, With Tjoon you can record your own stories, song or (birthday)wishes directly with your webcam and invite others to fill in the spots. If you play an instrument you can start an online jam session with your friends worldwide to explore some musical ideas or even become that one-man band you always dreamt of. The results can be posted on your own website using a widget as you can see this example.

Feel free to create your own Tjoons, it’s a hilarious process as we experienced ourselves during the making of the first few examples and the introduction movie. Have fun!

By far the most asked question regarding Floorplanner is: When are you adding 3D?
While there is some fantastic 3D software around, builders and architects remain working in 2D for a variety of reasons. So our main focus has been on building a useful tool to create accurate and great-looking 2D floorplans.

Besides the functional aspect there was also the technical aspect of Adobe Flash on which Floorplanner is built. Flash is lightning fast for 2D images and drawings but was never designed for real-time 3D.

So there were many reasons to stick to 2D plans but that didn’t stop us from looking for ways to add 3D functionality to our Floorplanner and thanks to Tim’s hard work and numerous prototypes and tests later we are proud to finally reveal the beta of Floorplanner 3D.

So how does Floorplanner looks in 3D?

The easy way is to check out our 3D demo project for yourself. You can click on the fourth tab named “3D” and the 3D Floorplan should appear in your main window. This 3D functionality is available for all users with a paid account (PLUS and PRO)

You can view walls, floors, windows and doors in real-time 3D and furniture elements in 2D outlines so you can see their position in your 3D plan. You can rotate and zoom, and you can switch views from top, front, or orthogonal view (without perspective) Tim has also added some goodies like auto-rotate and a full screen view and you can print and export your plans to JPG or PNG just like the 2D floorplans.

As noted above, the 3D functionality is in beta so there are still some issues we need to take care of in the coming weeks and there is a lot to improve in the future. Please let us know when you experience any bugs and consider an upgrade to a PLUS or PRO account so you can see your own plans in 3D.

Broadcasting company RTL is market leader in the Netherlands with 4 TV-channels and a lot of well-known TV shows and brands.

One of their popular TV shows is named “Eigen Huis & Tuin” (which translates literally to “Own Home & Garden”) This show has been running for over 12 years and attracts lots of viewers that watch the show or visit the website for Do-It-Yourself tips & tricks.

The producers of the TV-show are constantly searching for ways to improve the online experience for their audience and they wanted to add an interactive roomplanner to their website. Floorplanner was just what they were looking for.

So this weekend the Eigen Huis & Tuin Floorplanner was launched and this tool is directly available through the homepage of the TV-show. For those of you who want to take it for a test-drive, be aware the tool is in Dutch only…
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We got some really nice traffic this week from an article about Floorplanner in the Business 2.0 magazine. The article was published in last month’s magazine issue but the real traffic came when it was published on their website and was linked throughout the CNN network.

During the peak there were over 10 new accounts created each minute and it was a good test to see if our site could handle this. Luckily the site held up perfectly and Jaap, who was monitoring the traffic closely, didn’t had to resolve to any drastic measures. BTW the article was written by Erick Schonfeld who just got a new job at Techcrunch. Congratulations!

Today Floorplanner was also discussed on the popular TWIT radioshow by Leo Laporte and dr Rick Alber. We didn’t get a chance yet to hear the radio show ourselves but a short summary can be found here

Just returning from the Demofall07 conference in San Diego were we presented a new product in collaboration with Tubes Networks.

Tubes is a new software service that combines social networking features, peer-to-peer sharing, and offline/online synchronization, to create a convenient way of securely distributing content from one person to another, or to a network. Combining Floorplanner with Tubes allows professional users to create Floorplans offline and share relevant files like photo’s and contracts with colleagues who are using Tubes too.

You can find out more about this partnership in these two pressreleases. This new product is available for our larger PRO users as we are still beta-testing and need to make some final adjustments. If you want to be part of this beta , please let us know.