Being a lead contractor means that you often have to wear many different hats when it comes to dealing with the different aspects of construction projects. Below are four awesome apps for your iPhone and iPad that can be taken on the go. The apps listed below help contractors streamline four areas that need to be addressed in almost any construction project; performing advanced calculations, cost estimating, drawing up designs, and managing forms and reports.
Build Calc – Advanced Construction
Build Calc was designed with one goal; to fix everything that was wrong with all other construction calculators and create one comprehensive calculator that would help streamline calculations for contractors. Build Calc has streamlined all of the advanced functions and eliminated the need to go through many steps to get the calculation that you are looking for. When using any advanced functions you can get the results of your calculation within one to two presses of buttons. A few of the advanced functions that are included in this app are the advanced baluster function, the advanced stair function, fence function, interactive functions and much more. 42Nd Parallel is the developer of this app and they take pride in continuously updating the calculator with more advanced functions. This app is available in the Apple store for both the iPhone and iPad and also available in the Android Market and retails for $19.99.
iEstimate
This is app is a must for any contractor or cost estimator. This app has so many awesome features and what I am listing here is just the tip of the iceberg. There are built in project templates for the most typical construction jobs to use as baseline for creating project estimates. The app has a bar code scanner feature that works with all of the products in any Home Depot store. That’s right you can create an entire list of materials needed for a project and then go to Home Depot and scan in the items to total up the exact cost of materials needed. The app goes as far as having the ability to email estimates right to your customers so you don’t even need to pick up the phone. There are also many built in calculator functions and a whole lot more. This app is currently only available on the iPhone and retails in Apple’s app store for $19.99.
Construction Superintendent – Journeyman
This app created by Best Landscape Architects In The World Centrics LLC, is fairly new to the Apple app store and is currently only available for the iPad. The goal of this app is to create an efficient system of report sharing of the many different areas of a construction site. This app provides a complete set of reporting forms that are tailored for the construction management team to use to effectively monitor an entire construction project, share information and ensure that it is staying on schedule. This app retails for $99.99.
cadTouch Construction Electrician Navy
This app was created by Martin Fabrizi Carianni and is available in the Apple app store for both the iPhone and the iPad. This app is one of the most advanced CAD systems available on a smartphone or tablet. Some of the design features include parallel offset, preloaded objects, editable objects layers, dimensions and over a dozen more, and that is only the standard design features. There are many more advanced design features as well as tools such as polyline, sketch and text dimensions. A great benefit of this app is that to draw it does not require an internet connection, so you can create designs on the go. After a recent update cadTouch now allows you to save work in the same format as on a regular computer. There are many advanced features that come along with this app and the developer has put together a very comprehensive guide on how to use them on his website. The iPad version of this app sells for $19.99 and the iPhone version is $14.99.
Construction