Fred Mills ICIOB, director, the B1M and procurement manager, Osborne
My favourite app is easily Twitter. It’s really popular in our industry and a great way for keeping a finger on the pulse, especially for all the latest in BIM. That said I find myself increasingly addicted to Instagram, I love the simplicity of their concept. There are a few good construction apps out there but none that have really become widely used.
An app that pulls in the BIM-related posts of Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and news websites into one feed creating a simple go-to point would be ideal. It’s all very well having the technical apps for BIM but the social aspect is vitally important. It’s people that drive the process and input the data.
Daniel Hunt, director, Aecom Davis Langdon
BusChecker is my favourite app at the minute. It is one of those apps where you wonder “why didn’t I think of that?” whenever you use it. As a parent with a young child it helps reduce the pre-nursery bus stop wait to an absolute minimum which is a real blessing when battling the elements.
As far as a dream app is concerned, I would love something that collated live rates from the various construction suppliers. To be able to click on the very latest costs for partitions, vinyl flooring, plasterboard ceilings and the like would be very useful during final account negotiation.
Alternatively, a European contractor/consultant database where all projects being completed by a particular firm are listed and are scored on a weekly basis as to client satisfaction. This would be a brilliant thermometer of who is hot and who is not and invaluable for some of our clients entering new areas in Europe.
At Aecom, we are just about to launch HINT, an online tool designed to give our clients in the hotel industry an early sense check into the economic viability of a scheme. It brings together the expertise of our cost consultancy and economics teams to give developers a glimpse of a project’s investment potential simply by entering a few factors such as location, type of hotel and number of rooms.
Lucynda Jensen MCIOB, project manager, Morgan Sindall
The app I use most is the Transport for London’s bus and train timetable. It’s great if you’re in the office or out somewhere and look at quickly and think if I run I can make that train. I’m a big football fan and Liverpool supporter and my dream app would be one with betting tips for football matches which would be updated daily.
Gary Barley, partner and BIM manager, Calfordseaden
My favourite construction app at the moment is Autodesk BIM 360 Glue. The great thing about is it being able to upload models we’ve created of buildings and then take clients on a virtual tour on their iPad. It allows them to interrogate the model and provides a nice way of allowing them to feel part of the tour.
My favourite general app has got to be Tweetbot as I’m addicted to twitter!
Dream app? I would love to be able to visualise our models real time (ie out in the field) through a tablet device
that uses GPS coordinates rather than printed markers. It would be great to walk around the site and see what you’re building in that particular spot in the future.
Wes Beaumont MCIOB, design and BIM coordinator northern, Kier Construction
Several apps spring to mind – Twitter – I used to follow celebrities now I follow BIM celebs #ukbimcrew!; MLB (Major League Baseball), so I can watch the New York Mets lose nearly every night this year. Many a long student assignment night spent with this accompanying me.
Thirdly, Autodesk Formit, which is a Sketch Up type app. This is another evolution in digital design which is making it more efficient and productive to create mass models to re-use later in the design process. I hope that this is the start of a major touch screen type solution which makes it easier to model and create families in 3D.
My dream app would be a dictation app that can understand my broad Mancunian accent. It would make my work day a lot more efficient!
David Darlington, building control team manager, North West Leicestershire District Council
Believe it or not the only app I have, other than Mahjong, is a keyboard for fat fingers! Both are good though!
