At first let’s start by wishing you all a very happy 2008 from the complete Floorplanner team. We had quite an exciting 2007 partly because we launched Floorplanner.com and made a lot of progress in our development both in 2D and 3D but mainly because our tool is now being used by so many of you. Over 250.000 people created an account in 2007 and we did get a lot of positive reactions from you. Thanks for all your feedback and comments! We have a lot of good plans for 2008 and are looking forward to introduce them to you this year..

In the last weeks of 2007 we released a number of improvements that we wanted to put online before the new year. Below you can find the most important enhancements:

Fences & hedges

Many of the Floorplans that are being made contain (small) gardens and outdoor sites. We saw plans with dozens of hedges from our library and we thought this could be more efficient. So we expanded the Line tool with fences, hoards and hedges which make this a lot quicker.
Floorplanner Help
We updated our help section with a quickstart guide, more in-depth tutorials and articles with tips and tricks like Gido’s Guide to Floorplanner Goodness in which our graphical designer Gido explains how to create complex floor plans step by step. If you have a tip/trick or article that would fit in our help-section please let us know and earn a free Floorplanner PLUS account with your contribution.
Improved Templates

We did quite a major update on the template system for Floorplanner PRO accounts and expanded the number of customizable layouts from 1 to 8 making it easier to create a fitting, branded look for your published plans. Sign up for a FREE 30-day trial to play with this feature yourself.

Although we do our utmost best to upkeep the quality of Floorplanner somehow we introduced a nasty bug during an update we did last Thursday. It made Floorplanner less usable in Internet Explorer (Firefox + Safari were unaffected) as the drawing of walls and rooms was slower and less responsive as it should be. The same bug also was the cause of some other issues that seemed unrelated like a black background that suddenly appeared when plans were printed and a few other strange issues that you have been reporting. Based on your feedback Gert-Jan was able to find the bug and solve it quickly and we did an update yesterday that seems to have fixed it. Thank you all for your feedback and sorry for the inconvenience it might have caused you.

A growing number of people are using Floorplanner to plan their garden or patio which has lead to some lovely plans. Over the past months we’ve been steadily growing our garden libraries and added fences, hedges and other functionality to make gardenplanning easier and more fun within Floorplanner.

Behind the scenes Nico has been working on all sorts of Garden planning functionality and this will be introduced in the coming period. A glimpse of what’s ahead can be found through the Plantasjen Gardenplanner that was recently launched.

Plantasjen is a large chain of retailstores / gardencenters in Scandinavia and within their new website they integrated a customized Floorplanner that features their products and entire plant collection of over 2000+ plants. These plants can be selected and added from a HTML based plantfinder component outside the Floorplanner and a list of your plants is automatically generated while you are working on the design of your garden. These plans can be saved, mailed or printed for future reference or to take with you to the store as a shopping list.

The Plantasjen Gardenplanner is currently available in Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish and both the functionality as the libraries will grow in the coming months alongside the gardenplanning functionality in Floorplanner.