Working together on a specific floorplan with different people within a team has become easier with the partnership between Octopz and Floorplanner. Octopz offers advanced online collaboration technologies built specifically for creative professionals. With fully integrated support for text messaging, VoIP and webcams, Octopz allows colleagues and partners anywhere in the world to work together securely in real-time, or individually at their own convenience.

At the Web2.0 Expo that is currently being held in San Fransisco, Octopz unveils the new version of their product and besides support for Flickr and Yahoo maps this new version will also have Floorplanner integration. In the near future users will be able to login to Floorplanner from within Octopz and import their plans into an Octopz session for review and feedback.

Since the first day we released Floorplanner.com (almost a year ago) there has been interest from students and teachers worldwide to use Floorplanner within the classroom. It is being used both for (homework) assignments as for actual classroom planning and it's being mentioned in educational resources and even podcasts. We regularly receive nice feedback like the following email we got recently:

"I used your site with my technology education class and they loved it. It was their favorite activity. Do you sell a version of this to schools? Thanks for letting us use your great product. Keep up the great work!"

We love this as we always have envisioned Floorplanner to be used for educational purposes and of course we want to stimulate this. That's why we are working on some refinements making Floorplanner even more usable in the classroom and testing a special version of our PRO account for teaching. Below you can find one of the many examples of classrooms being created with Floorplanner.

If you are using (or planning to use) Floorplanner within your classroom please let us know in the comments below. We'd love to hear how you are using our tool and how we can improve it for this specific use. Also leave a comment or contact us directly if you want to get invited to the beta program of Floorplanner for Schools that will allow teachers to collect and review all plans from their students through one account.

Floorplanner is currently attending the Keller Williams Family Reunion 2008 (blog) in Atlanta, Georgia with over 7500 of Keller Williams' agents. Keller Williams is the 4th largest real estate company in the United States and has one of the best training and consulting services in the market. Floorplanner showed a virtual staging demonstration where interactive floorplans can be used to help market luxury homes, new construction, and new housing developments.

Interest was very high for using Floorplanner as a key differentiator for agents who are competing in a very tough real estate market. Interactive floorplans are the next logical attachment to MLS listings that now have photos, virtual tours and maps.

For Keller Williams agents we have set up a special KW landing page for with samples, pricing and instructions how to upload existing floorplans and blueprints to have those converted into interactive floorplans that can be added or even integrated within listings. We are welcoming Keller Williams agents into our customer base and want to say thanks for having us at your Family Reunion 2008.

Steelcase, the global leader in the office furniture industry, helps people have a better work experience by providing products, services and insights into the ways people work.

To give visitors of the Steelcase website more tools to plan their perfect office a branded Floorplanner was integrated within the Steelcase web store.

Within moments an accurate floor plan of an office space can be created and a growing selection of Steelcase products can be added to this plan so users can test out various layouts. A "shopping list" is automatically generated based on the configuration and each item links to the productpage on the Steelcase store.

So if you are planning a new office space or your current work environment needs a rearrangement, visit the Steelcase store and take this tool for a spin...

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)