DENVER, CO (AIA 2013), June 22, 2013 - IMSI/Design, the company best known for TurboCAD, was a surprise exhibitor at AIA. Always careful with its expenses, I would have expected them to pony up for a booth, much less have 4 people manning it, including their CEO Royal Farros and COO Bob Mayer.
It was Doug Cochran, formerly of Autodesk and now CTO of IMSI, who showed me the latest enhancements to the TurboSite, IMSI's iPad-based application which lets you view building plans --and do a whole lot more.
TurboSite, as its name would imply, is meant to be used on a construction site. With it loaded on your iPad, you can compare what is being built to what was in the plans. You can mark up drawing, add notes. Notes can appear in balloons, or other shapes and it is kind enough to make a nice looking shape even if you can't draw one. You can take photos with the iPad and have them associated with the proper part of the plan. As the iPad can be aware of its locations, you can place yourself in the plan. TurboSite will take advantage of GPS and cell towers when available but claims to be able to tell exactly where it is even the absence of any signal. Magic?
Compare an iPad loaded with TurboSite to how you normally document a construction project. A folded set of E-size drawings for reference, scrawling notes on a clipboard, using a measuring tape.. If all does indeed work as advertised, the iPad should win hands down. Maybe my stingy construction company would not spring for an iPad so I'd just the one from home. I'd just have to be careful to not walk into a ditch because I couldn't take your eyes off the screen.
For more information, go to the TurboSite page on IMSI/Design.
One of the feedback I got about an older version (1.0?) of Turbosite was the inability to display block attributes. Is this possible now?
Good to see the app on iPhone now. I have to ask some of my clients to re-evaluate the 1.3 version.
Posted by: Rakesh Rao | July 09, 2013 at 09:09 PM