FloorPlan
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Google offers Floor Plan Marker app to businesses so they can improve indoor mapping
Are folks still getting lost in the faux marble expanse of your airport or shopping mall, even after you've uploaded the floor plan to Google Maps? Then maybe it's time you went the extra mile and improved indoor mapping using the official Floor Plan Marker app. It instructs you to walk around the "entire surface" of your place of interest, while gathering position data from GPS, public WiFi signals and cell towers. Once added to Google's database, this extra info will allow the familiar blue dot to function on your customers' Android phones even when your actually-concrete building gets in the way of their satellite signal. The app's already available at Google Play, so go ahead -- make the schlep now so that others don't have to.
Detailed floor plans of new Cupertino 'spaceship' campus released
The city of Cupertino has made the proposed and revised plans for Apple's massive new "spaceship" campus available to the public. If you've got a thing for blueprints and architectural renderings, check out the link to the proposed floor plans for the campus, a 25-page PDF that details the incredible scale and scope of Apple's proposal. Some of the more impressive things I found in my perusal of the plans: The edge-to-edge footprint of the circular structure is just over 1520 feet, or more than a quarter of a mile. The outer circumference of the main building is nearly 4800 feet, or 9/10 of a mile. The main structure contains over 1.8 million square feet of office space spread over 4 above-ground levels. A 4-story, 58,050 square foot restaurant space on the building's northeast corner will provide food for the whole campus. The main building's roof is almost entirely covered in solar panels. Two basement parking levels beneath the main building contain a total of 4300 parking spaces. Another 4-level satellite parking structure provides an additional 4600 spaces. A (relatively) small satellite building provides access to a basement auditorium with seating for approximately 1000 people seated before an enormous stage -- very probably the site of future Apple events. Another satellite structure contains a gigantic corporate fitness center with a 2-story, 48,000 square foot exercise area and what looks like an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Six separate R&D facilities comprise a total of 300,000 square feet of space. The scale of this new campus is impressive and ambitious in just about every detail, and it'll be quite a thing to see once it's finished in 2015.
MagicPlan app magically creates interactive floor plans
Many years ago when my wife and I were looking for the perfect house, I used to pore over the floor plans that home builders would create. While it was often difficult to translate the lines that designated the walls and doors of the house into a three-dimensional representation of what the interior actually looked like, the floor plans were helpful in at least getting an idea of how foot traffic would flow and where we could place furniture when we could afford it. A French-Canadian development company, Sensopia, has just released an app that takes the work out of creating floor plans. Sensopia's MagicPlan works with the iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod touch. To build a floor plan, you go into each room and take a picture of each corner of the room. By doing that, MagicPlan measures the walls and doors in the room, and it creates a floor plan of each room. You then slide the rooms into their proper location by dragging them on the screen, and MagicPlan aligns the rooms and manages the thickness of the walls. Finally, furniture and photos can be added to show what the actual house or apartment looks like, and geotagging information is attached. The app is free for download, and the free version provides you with a watermarked non-commercial use JPEG, PDF or a version that is uploaded to a website for viewing. For US$4.99, the watermark is removed and the floor plan is available for commercial use. For US$9.99, Sensopia throws in six months of web hosting -- the latter is useful for real estate agents who want to show off floor plans and photographs to potential home buyers. There's a video on the next page showing how this innovative app works.
E3 floor plans posted
The organizers of E3 have posted the event's floor plans. Microsoft (South Hall) and Sony (West Hall) are as far apart as possible. But the heat will still be on in the West Hall where Nintendo and Sony are stacked shoulder-to-shoulder. It's gonna be a good one!Now's the time to plan your attack. Doors open at 11:00 am on Wednesday, May 10.
