We've been rebuilding Giraffe from the ground up, and it's almost ready. Giraffe 6.0 is scheduled to land in your browser in a little over a week.
Giraffe 6.0 will be opt-in to start - you can choose to stay on Giraffe 4.0 as long as you wish.
Here's a first look at what's coming.
Giraffe's whole workspace has been redesigned. Panels are dockable and resizable, so you can arrange Map, Layers, Properties, and every other app exactly how you work. Save your arrangement as a layout, switch between layouts with a click, and share your favorite setups with your team. A new top bar and a redesigned drawing toolbar make everything easier to find.

Manage your projects, workspace settings, and account from one place. Sort and filter your projects table, batch edit properties, and add custom branding to your workspace home page. Plus, curated templates for multifamily, industrial, and mixed-use.

A new two-row toolbar puts every drawing tool, plus a searchable command menu, within reach. Under the hood, dozens of fixes make drawing and editing feel tighter across the board.

Your blocks, usages, flows, and layers now live in one rebuilt Content Library, with clear sections for your workspace, the marketplace, and anything you publish. Preview items before you use them, organize your own packs, and find what you need faster.

Two new tools do the heavy lifting for you. The Garden tool lays out landscaping along a site edge in seconds. The Wrap tool generates a full building wrap, complete with garages, corridors, courtyards, and residential units.

Giraffe is growing. A new Excel-style spreadsheet app pulls numbers straight from your live project. A Multi-Family Cockpit generates a matching site plan as you adjust the deal. And a new Industrial site planner finds the largest building footprint that fits your lot.

Sign up here for early access.
For a long time, every new project in Giraffe started the exact same way: a blank map, and a blank slate. We built it that way on purpose. Flexibility felt like the safer bet, don't assume what someone's building, just give them everything and let them figure it out.
We look at three things together:
We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Jakob Nielsen's classic ten heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.
For this one, the clearest signal came from a simple question we already ask at signup: what are you building? Residential, industrial, and mixed-use came back as the three most common answers by a clear margin, which is exactly why those are the three templates we built first.
An open-ended blank canvas sounds like the flexible choice. In practice, it just moves the same setup work onto every single person, every single project, and the numbers back that up from a few different angles.
New workflow-specific templates, built for multifamily, industrial, and mixed-use projects, preloaded with the usages, flows, apps, and layouts that actually fit that kind of work. Even the lightning bolt flows reflect the template's content, so nothing in the toolkit feels generic. It's all tailor-made for the workflow you've selected. Choose the template that matches the deal in front of you, and skip straight past the setup that a blank canvas would have made you do from scratch.
Less time recreating the same setup you've built a dozen times before, more time on the parts of the deal that actually need your judgement. A multifamily template won't make you sift through warehouse uses. An industrial template won't bury you in dwelling types. It's a small change with a compounding effect: every new project starts closer to real work instead of further from it.
Part of a series on the reasoning behind Giraffe 6.0. See also our posts on the new home screen, configurable layouts, project creation, properties palette, content consolidation, the rebuilt drawing toolbar, and drawing quality of life improvements.
When we first built Giraffe, we made a sneaky little assumption: that everyone thinks in maps. Open a map, find your site, start drawing. Great if you're hunting for a new site. Not so great if you're not. So a fair few people were stuck wading through a map just to check on a project they already had.
Here's how we know it wasn't just a handful of people finding this awkward.
We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Nielsen's heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.
In this case, all data pointed the same way: people getting stuck in a Space when they just wanted their project list, and admins asking, in plain terms, for a simpler view of their own workspace.
The new home screen shows your recent projects and quick actions the second you log in. No map required. Admins get a clear view of the whole workspace too, without needing to open a project first.

If your day is mostly about projects, not hunting for new sites, you don't need to think in maps anymore. Your recent work, your quick actions, everything you need is right there when you log in. That includes your own stuff, your admin tools if you've got them, and your personal settings too.
This is one part of a broader look at what's changing in Giraffe 6.0. Curious about the thinking behind the changes? We put together a bigger-picture look at why we're making these changes across the whole product.
Some of the best fixes are the ones you never notice, until they're gone. Nothing about drawing in Giraffe was broken. It just had small frictions that added up: control points only ever landing at the centre of an edge, no dedicated mode for reshaping what you'd drawn, no quick way to bump levels or base height without opening a panel.
We look at three things together:
We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Jakob Nielsen's classic ten heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.
For this one, there wasn't a single big red flag the way there was with some of the other 6.0 changes. It showed up as a pattern of small, recurring gripes, the kind of thing people mention almost in passing rather than filing as a proper complaint.
None of these were "Giraffe is broken" problems. They were "this is more annoying than it needs to be" problems.
Scale and move become the default. Flip into edit mode to reshape an edge, and alt-click to drop a point exactly where you want it, not just the centre. New shortcuts drag levels and base height up in one motion, no detour required. Push/pull gets a spot on the draw bar as a bonus, alongside a new integrated command line.

Precision where you want it, without a workaround. A clear mode for reshaping, instead of guessing. Fewer trips out of the drawing flow for small, repeated adjustments. Nothing flashy, just drawing that's snappier, faster, and harder to get wrong.
Flows and Blocks from your project's content library are also coming to the drawing toolbar itself, so grabbing something you've already built is a click away.
Part of a series on the reasoning behind Giraffe 6.0. See also our posts on the new home screen, configurable layouts, project creation, properties palette, content consolidation, and the rebuilt drawing toolbar.
At the end of the day, real estate is just polygons on a map. A building is a shape. A driveway is a shape. A patch of grass is a shape.
But Giraffe didn't treat it that way; it sorted everything by type first. A driveway was infrastructure. A building was a use class. A patch of grass was its own category.
Classification is important for the data and calculations underneath, but it's a pretty confusing way to ask someone to start drawing.
Here's how we know that typology-based drawing tools were actually getting in people's way.
We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Nielsen's heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.
For this one, the pattern was hard to miss: people asking how to draw basic shapes, and usage data showing the same drawing mistakes happening over and over, right alongside each other.
In this case, the pattern was hard to miss: people asking how to draw basic shapes, and usage data showing the same drawing mistakes happening over and over, right alongside each other.
The rebuilt drawing toolbar leads with plain shapes, polygon, line, point, instead of selecting from a categorized tool first.

With the pet palette, you don't need to already know how Giraffe classifies a use to start drawing. You can pick from a list instead of having to remember whether something counts as a building, a landscape feature, or a road. Search the same usage list no matter what type of thing you're creating, instead of a different setup for every category.

You'll sketch faster, because you're not stuck figuring out Giraffe's categories before you've even drawn the shape in your head. Less wrestling with the tool, more time actually exploring the design options that matter.
This is one part of a broader look at what's changing in Giraffe 6.0. Curious about the thinking behind the changes? We put together a bigger-picture look at why we're making these changes across the whole product.
A handful of fixes landed this week to smooth out some rough edges across projects, scenarios, and flows. Here's what's changed:
Want to see what else we're working on? Check out our Giraffe 6.0 release series.
Real estate software has a tough job. It has to work for architects doing massing studies, planners doing site analysis, and developers crunching numbers on a deal, all on the same platform.
Giraffe used to have one fixed layout for everyone. It meant everyone was stuck working around a setup that wasn't really built for their job. The fixed layout was holding people back, and it needed to go.
Here's how we know wasn't just a hunch.
We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Nielsen's heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.
In this case, the usage data was the loudest signal: constant panel switching, especially on smaller screens, backed up by a steady stream of "where do I find X" messages that pointed to the same root cause.
App locations aren't fixed anymore. Create, split, and merge panels. Drag them, resize them, dock them wherever you need. Create multiple layouts in every project for different workflows. Your setup sticks around for next time too. Plus, a redesigned top bar makes getting around easier, no matter how you've set things up.



Less time messing with your screen, more time doing the actual work. The analysis, the massing study, the client meeting.
Deep in site analysis? Put Map and Layers side by side. Meeting a client? Clear the clutter and show only what matters. Working from a laptop on-site instead of a big office monitor? The layout actually fits now, instead of you squinting to find things.
And once you build a setup you like, Giraffe remembers it. You shouldn't have to rebuild your canvas every single time you open a project. Nobody's got time for that.
This is one part of a broader look at what's changing in Giraffe 6.0. Curious about the thinking behind the changes? We put together a bigger-picture look at why we're making these changes across the whole product.
This release brings two major additions — nested block editing and a new dwelling section type — alongside a batch of fixes across blocks, apartment layouts, and space navigation.
Nested Block Editing
Edit a block definition from inside another block edit!

The block editor header now shows a breadcrumb trail (Project › parent block › current block) with unsaved-change indicators at each level, click-to-rename on the current block, and context-aware Save & Return / Save & Exit buttons (Discard only appears when there are unsaved changes).
Entering and exiting nested edits is fully undoable, saving with no changes no longer rewrites the block definition, and a failed save (e.g. block too large) shows an error and keeps the edit open.
Dwelling Usage Type
A new "dwelling" type, selectable from the Usage Type dropdown, behaves like a building section but represents individual dwellings.

Assign a usage and the section counts as one dwelling per level or a fixed count (toggle in the new Dwellings editor), with per-dwelling residents, price, and parking rates; a warning appears if no usage is assigned. Dwelling sections participate in stacking, site clipping, the Urban dashboard, and Precinct scenario tables alongside regular building sections.
Other Updates
levels property now always propagates from block instances to their contents by default.setIsolatedFeatures / clearIsolatedFeatures are now ignored (with a console warning) while a block edit is in progress, instead of corrupting the edit session.useGiraffeState('projects') stale value fix (SDK)This release focuses on stability and polish across the map, drawing tools, and workflows, with fixes for lens filtering, polygon merging, temporary layers, and parking layouts, plus a few new capabilities like always-on snapping and modify-property workflow nodes.
Drawing & Snapping
Map, Layers & Styling
Flow
SDK
updateLayerTreeVisibility for pushing layer visibility/opacity/group state changes to the map.flyTo/fitBounds now works correctly when transitioning from 2D to 3D view.Enterprise & Workspace
Reliability & Misc.
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Giraffe v5.8.0 brings a significantly expanded flow system, a rebuilt Content Library with a new feature picker, and a suite of new drawing and modelling tools. This release also includes a raft of quality-of-life improvements — from project cleanup tools and a save status indicator to a faster engine and a friendlier crash experience.
Design Library, rebuilt inside Content Library Your saved designs now live inside the Content Library. When importing from a project, you can pick exactly the features you want using a combined map and table view — marquee-select on the map, hover highlighting, column filtering, and zoom-to-extents.
Access Design Library functions from Content Library > Import from Project.

Patch drawing tool A new Patch tool lets you draw a polygon where each corner has its own height, making it easy to model sloped slabs and wedge-shaped surfaces. Edit slab/wedge type and per-corner values in the property editor; hovering a corner input highlights the corresponding vertex on the map.

Project cleanup tools A new cleanup menu in project settings lets you bulk-delete empty draw layers, unused usages, unused flows, unused blocks, and unused scenarios — each showing a live count with a confirmation prompt before deletion. You can also reset usages to Giraffe defaults.

Context layers auto-exclude the project area New projects now have "excludes project boundary" applied by default on 3D building and trees context layers.

Saved views simplified Saved views now always capture camera, layer state, and scenarios together — no more per-item toggles or "update layers from map" buttons. The editor warns before discarding unsaved changes, shows a preview of saved layers, and surfaces views shared with your team. Noisy success alerts have been removed.
3D primitives: pitch & bearing rotation Primitive rotation can now be set using pitch and bearing (elevation + azimuth) in addition to raw XYZ angles. Toggle between modes in the property editor.
Flow inputs for usages, blocks, and flows Flow input parameters now support Usage, Block, and Flow types, each with a dedicated picker in the flow controls panel.
Flow picker Selecting a flow for a feature is now a searchable dropdown. You can also create a new flow inline — including directly from the properties panel — with an option to add it to your currently selected features.
Flow defaults Flows can now carry default property values — including usage. Set them in the new Flow Defaults editor, and the on-map generative editors (envelope, subdivisions, parking, skeleton) will respect those defaults when parameters haven't been overridden.
fetchWorkspaceDetails, updateWorkspaceDetails, getProjectBundle, and createRawSection (single and bulk)evaluateFeatures stacking — output options now resolve stacking (_baseHeight, _height, _stackOrder) in one call, removing the need for a separate stackFeatures call. Polygon winding requirements are now documented.validateLensStyle helper returns a list of problems in a lens style objectfetchAppCredentials, fetchCredentials, and setUserData functionsgetLayerContents now serves features from already-loaded map layers (with optional lens filtering); project layers resolve by more ID forms; activateLensLayer throws a clear error when the layer doesn't existdisableLensSelectionDrawer option now also disables the black selection outline on the map