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.

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.

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.

Floorplanner was already available in English, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish & Portuguese and since this week it is also available in the German language.

In the past few months Floorplanner attracted a steady flow of German visitors and we got some nice reviews from German press and blogs. In the feedback we did receive there were many requests for a “Deutsche” version so here it is

There still might be some irregularities so if you find any errors or have suggestions for a better translation please let us know.
Viel Spaß!

These past few weeks we have reserved for doing some serious housekeeping regarding Floorplanner. We are focusing on solving small issues and bugs that we haven’t solved earlier because they were either too small or too time-consuming. Many of these were cause for small irritations for users and for ourselves.

We did identify over 180 points for improvement and did already tackle about 60% of them in the past weeks. Some are very small and hardly noticeable (like an extra pixel or space) but others improvements are more significant. Below you can find some of the bigger improvements that we did recently:

Improved textures
We have worked a new way to generate textures. Using the new method textures are spaces are filled up much quicker with textures. This means designs load and update quicker in your browser. Also we added some new textures: sand, water and bark.

Room bug
There was still an ugly bug that made unwanted areas appear in drawings when you deleted or did redraw your spaces. This is now history because we found and solved the bug that created floors under the walls and it seems this bug doesn’t appear anymore.

Grouping & Locking
By holding the SHIFT key you can select multiple furniture elements; This makes it possible to perform operations at multiple elements at once. By locking elements you can make items non-editable & non-movable. Useful to avoid stairs, doors and windows from being changed unwanted.

New furniture
We added new fitness machines, balconies, cupboards,pillows, swimming pools and a set of Halloween items


And more…:
Other improvements: you can split walls quicker by holding the CTRL-key and clicking on a wall. Also we added a duplicate button for textitems, and we solved some minor bugs with the space drawing tool.

We are still busily working on fixing other points in the coming weeks so please let us know if you see small bugs we need to work on.

Customizing a house is becoming easier with the V-Factor concept of Dutch building developer Van der Vorm. A tailor-made Floorplanner assists (potential) buyers in their choices and allows them to explore the possibilities of the floorplans for their new house.

You start by choosing the width of the house (these are rowhouses) and the desired options (baywindow, terrace) after this the interactive Floorplans for all floors are generated automatically. These can be customized by adding new walls, doors and room as you like and be shared by mail. The resulting floorplans are shown on the V-Factor homepage so people can get inspiration from their future neighbours.

You can try out the V-Factor Floorplanner yourself but beware it is only available in Dutch. Have fun!

+++ UPDATE +++

The V-Factor concept is one of the winners of the “Ik bouw mijn huis in Almere” Design competition, see more info here (Dutch only)

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.

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!

This weekend we have passed the milestone of 100.000 user accounts that have been created at Floorplanner.com. We are proud and excited that this many people have signed up to use our tool. We would like to invite you all for some coffee and cake at our offices but we are afraid it won’t fit

Some more information about these figures: It took us about 6 months (during the Dutch Beta period) to reach one third (=33.000) of the total accounts, about 3 months to get to 66.000 and 1.5 month to reach 100.000 user threshold. We think this shows some healthy growth and hope this continues as we are constantly improving our Floorplanner and will introduce some new cool features in the near future. It’s great to see that these 100.000 accounts originate from over 200 countries, below you can see the top 10

1. Netherlands
2. United States
3. China
4. Belgium
5. United Kingdom
6. Germany
7. Canada
8. Australia
9. India
10. Italy

What we find even more encouraging, besides these numbers, is the quality of the floorplans you are creating and the feedback we receive. We visit the Floorplanner Fresh page regularly and are frequently amazed by the plans you are making. You are providing us with lots of positive comments and useful feedback that helps us to improve our tool and as we recently launched our forums there is also a more public place to share your thoughts and remarks online with other users.

So thank you all for using our product and we hope we can post about a new milestone soon….

We made some changes to the properties window for editing floors and choosing floor textures. This will make it easier finding the right floor when we add more types in the future.

What’s different?
When you click on a floor the properties window appears (see below). The new properties window shows the current texture in the selected color. Instead of a list with names, you can now scroll through pictures of all the available textures. Furthermore we implemented the same rotation and color picking tool as used in the furniture properties menu.
We plan on adding some new textures soon. If you have any textures you wish to choose from, please post a comment on this weblog or in our forums. Questions or other comments are welcome too.