Engineering iPad apps 2

[carnahanad]

Hey guys,

Our company recently bought us iPads. I was hoping that some of my fellow engineers would know about some good apps that help out with work. I'm a structural engineer, but I'm really looking for any app (free or otherwise) that has been helpful in the engineering field. It could be as simple as a calculator or sketch pad to something that breaks down forces and helps with load take down. Even if it's not structural related, I can probably pass it on to the MEPT guys I work with.

Thanks.

 

[beej67]

FieldNotes LT

It's new, it's free, it's everything you want in a field note system. You snap photos, attach them to notes, which are then georeferenced to your GPS location while snapping the photos, and you can email the note as a KMZ file so recipients can pull it up in Google Earth, where they see a thumbtack of your location when snapping the photo, and see the photos as well.

Very impressed.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[bernoullies123]

ASME - 5 Mobile Apps for Engineers

http://www.asme.org/kb/news---artic...y/mobile-apps-for-engineers--what’s-in-store-

 

[JohnRBaker]

You must have missed something in that URL as it returns a 404 error.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[IRstuff]

The link is the same as when I go to the first search hit from:

http://www.asme.org/search.aspx?searchText=asme mobile app&#page=1,category=

And it refreshes in place correctly, but can't be pasted into a new window or tab in IE. If you click the link in Chrome or FF, it should work.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[trainguy]

How about a photo app that allows me to instantly handwrite, with my fingertip, some notes on the photo, so I never have to draw on site again...

tg

 

[dik]

I sent my son an eMail telling him that I just picked up a couple of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and I was just getting into them. I set one up for myself and one for my wife.

He replied about 5 minutes later with the following link:

http://galaxytabhacks.com./

It appears people are already 'taking it apart' and the one link loads a Linux variant Ubuntu... quite pleased with the tablets (not phone capable).

Dik

 

[Trafdata]

The number of civil engineering iPhone/iPad apps are slowly increasing. There has been more of an emphasis on structure related apps more than other civil disciplines. Most function like old programs for HP calculators. If you search under "civil engineering", you'll see several apps by Intesym for trusses and frames. I haven't tried any (I'm a traffic engineer), but I do know that CASA Intuition and BeamsforBuilders sell pretty well. Flo Hydraulic Calculator by Appadana also looks like it was put together well by the developer.

I've been personally developed the MUTCD app, TurnCount, and TurnCount Lite apps for the iPhone and iPad. I've been working on mobile apps for about 2 years now. The TurnCount app can replace a count board and is compatible with JAMAR's PetraPRO. The MUTCD app simplifies finding everything in the 2009 Federal MUTCD, especially signs.

Regards,
Gary

http://www.trafdata.com

 

[electricpete]

I am late into the smart-phone game, but finally got an Android phone (Samsung Infuse) as part of family X-mas gift (err... that's 5 phones for the family including one for my 13-year old, all "free" except for that minor detail of monthly bill for 24-months to be paid by the old man = me I'm sad to say).

So now the question of this thread is of interest to me: what kinds of cool stuff (engineering calcs) can I do with this new toy ?

I could not read the link of the 5 ASME Apps even after cutting/pasting. Can anyone list the 5 Apps here?

I remember the free Mathcad-like program "smath" is supposed to work with handheld devices. I was disappointed to read on their forum that Android is not among those (I don't think iPhone is either but you might want to double-check if you have one of those) and development of smath for Android is "paused".

I am also interested in spreadsheets. I tried the Quicksheet that came pre-loaded. It was clearly not suitable to programming. The odd thing is that if you enter a formula you find yourself in a keypad entry screen with absolutely no way to "point" to other cells to make them part of your formula. (I guess you could type in the cell address, but that seems silly to me). I guess if there's a way to get spreadsheets from PC into smartphone, it would make a lot of sense to use spreadsheets developed on pc and transferred to smartphone, rather than developing them on the smartphone. I'll be fiddling around with my Android to see if there is a way to do that....I'm still a newbiew in handling files on this thing (In meantime, does anyone know if Quicksheet reads normal xls files?).

There is one App that wasn't mentioned in this thread that should be of interest to some engineers particularly the older ones. Droid48 = free program for Androids to emulate HP48 handheld calculators. I spent a lot of time using and programming with HP41CV many years ago.... not all by choice... partially due to instructors who I'm convinced had a bit of a sadistic streak in requiring us to do repetitive numeric calcs by handheld calculator which were much better suited to PC's already available at that time. But there is some good that came out of that traumatic experience after all.... the HP48 syntax seems identical (for my purposes) to the HP41CV syntax that was beaten into my memory. Also, there are free manuals for the HP48 that can be downloaded on-line, and many many free programs and libraries available on-line. And writing programs yourself is pretty easy if you've already used one of those calculators. How to transfer programs between PC and Android is again something I'm not sure about yet.
I have to admit though, it's somewhat weird and ironic that I am considering it a useful tool to be able to use a 1.6 Ghz 16GB 2011 device to emulate a 128k ram, late 80's device.



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[IDS]

electricpete - I said back in May that I wasn't impressed with E-cell xls pro. To be fair, I should report that it is getting better and seems to be under steady development. It recently acquired programming capabilities via javascript. It still won't run VBA, but with Google Docs programming being Javascript based, possibly this is the way to go anyway.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[electricpete]

Thanks Doug. I spent awhile playing with Google docs and you're right it has some promise, but not perfect.

At first I thought the basic strategy would be:
1 - Take your key often-used spreadsheets from pc.
2 - Transfer to google docs.
3 - Open in Android and see what doesn't work.
4 - Fix the version that lives on google docs to be compatiable with Android.
Steps 1 thru 3 might be skipped to varying extends if you already know limitations of google docs on Android.

I tried several spreadsheets and all opened on Android, but none of them worked to my satisfaction yet.

I have one very close to working, all I needed was drop-down data menu using data validation. Google docs says they have that, so I added it to the google docs version using my pc. Works fine on the pc. On the Android, it puts a little foot-note next to the cell which tells you to input only values from range B5:B9 (where my example values lie. No help there to save typing.

As you probably already discovered, vba doesn't transfer over. Neither does the analysis took-pak complex math functions.

I think it could still be useful. The strategy would have to be:
Build spreadsheet from ground up (on pc) with the limiations of Android in google in mind.



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[electricpete]

To avoid hijacking this thread, since the title of this thread says "iPad", I'll start a new one for Android.

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