Tablet As Building Engineering Tool, Part 2: Designing
Reviewing documents, sizing equipment and systems, and sketching on the go: got an app for that? Also, we compare tablet vs. phone and the advantages or worries that come with taking your tablet into imperfect field conditions. How do you use yours?
After a brief hiatus, we are resuming exploration of the tablet as engineering tool. In the first article, we examined the energy study and how the tablet can facilitate tasks such as annotating existing documents, taking notes, and storing and accessing documents. In this installment, we will look at engineering design for buildings. But first, I will share some input and feedback from readers and colleagues in the form of an enhancement to the tasks discussed last time as part of the energy study, and the obvious extension of this exploration beyond the tablet to the smartphone.
Let’s look at using your voice instead of your fingers or stylus for note-taking. A colleague of mine pointed out that it is often difficult and time-consuming to make written notes while spelunking the bowels of a building or clambering up to the roof. So lately, he has been using dictation to take notes with his tablet. There are a number of ways to do this. More recent versions of the iPad and iOS offer voice input as an alternative to keyboarding. Simply tap the microphone key and you can use your voice instead of your fingers. This works in Notability, the note-taking app explored last time. Dragon Dictation is another app that is focused on voice entry, and the resulting text can be applied to messaging, email, or pasted into any other application.