I especially love that Lachmi begins and end the article with reflections on her own relationship with the iPad, being a somewhat reluctant adopter, having limited expectations and ultimately coming to recognize the productive power of Apple’s little tablet. I think this is a common experience for those that really put forth some effort in integrating iPad into their daily life. And I also think this sort of endorsement for iPad is so much more meaningful that the normal fanboy and hater rhetoric that’s unfortunately much more prevalent.

I particularly enjoyed her closing remarks as it’s a poignant point that close to home for us. She writes

When my iPad was delivered, the FedEx employee delivering it commented, as he was handing the package to me, “Here’s your new toy.” (Apparently, he could look at the address it had been sent from and figure out that it was an iPad.) I didn’t think much of this comment at first, but seeing the app from Inception that is priced like any other desktop computer application makes me wonder when the iPad will go beyond being seen as a “toy” and as a serious business tool by AEC professionals.

Great article. Worth the read. See the full article on AECbytes.

Oh yeah, we’ll be handing out free Architactile t-shirts while supplies last so stop by and say hello!

We’re awful proud of Inception for iPad and we think it’s a revolutionary tool. However, when we show folks Inception – as excited as they might be – sometimes they just aren’t ready to buy an iPad, and we’re often asked if Inception runs on iPhone. From a user interface perspective it’s not really practical to do everything Inception does on an iPhone but after some thought we decided to try to boil it down to the essentials. The result is Inception Jr. for iPhone.

Inception Jr. for iPhone is a bare bones version of Inception for iPad that allows the architect to create high quality preliminary scope, bubble diagram and conceptual budget PDF exhibits right on their iPhone.

Click here to learn more about Inception Jr. You can also see a side-by-side comparison of feature in Inception and Inception Jr. here.

And, of course, we’d love it if you head on over to the App Store and buy a copy of Inception Jr. for yourself. Your iPhone will love you for it.

We’re excited about Inception Jr. but we don’t have time to reflect on a job well done because we’re hard at work on an update for Inception which should hit the App Store in a couple of weeks. We don’t want to give too much away just yet, but here’s a hint… adjacencies.

Architactile was mentioned on Architizer’s Wednesday’s Brew today…

There’s an App for that: running an office edition. Architactile is a new start-up whose goal is to make touch computing useful for architects. Their first iPad app, Inception, has launched, and it’s revolutionary in a few ways. Architects are notoriously bad business people, and Inception provides a set of standards and tools for “accelerating the development of early stage project scope and conceptual budget” (imagine sitting with your client and using your tablet to negotiate timelines and budget distribution). Inception joins the slowly growing cadre of serious business apps aimed at utilizing the iPad’s intuitive interface to streamline communication between clients and employees.

It’s been a while since my last post. We’ve been hard at work preparing for the release of the Architactile Inception. The final code was submitted to Apple for approval on New Year’s Eve and has already received approval. This week we’re getting our ducks in a row for the launch and finalizing some details with our 3rd party content providers but we expect to officially launch Architactile Inception in the App Store on Tuesday of next week (January 18, 2011).
There should be some updates on the website over the next couple of days outlining the final list of features. We’ll also be posting to the blog with deals about where we plan to go form here. Until then, I’ll leave you with one of the images we’ve prepared for the App Store. It show one of the coolest new features, some sample output from Inception in the form of a branded PDF. Stay tuned.

We’re very pleased with the response and would like to share a little of what we learned. First, the numbers… Inception Lite was downloaded by 2,981 folks during our two month trial. Here’s how those downloads break down by country:

We weren’t surprised by the fact that the US had the most downloads but the US’s percent of overall downloads was much smaller than we’d expected. As a result we released an update a couple of weeks before the end of the trial that added support for metric units and currency symbols other than the dollar sign (“$”).

From the feedback we received, the key features we’re adding for the initial release of Inception are:

* PDF deliverables for the client with custom branding
* Comma separated space list (for use in Excel, Trelligence Affinity, etc.)

For the first half of next year we’re looking at adding:

* Ability to copy projects (can be used to create project templates)
* Preliminary project schedule
* Mixed-use allowable area per floor analysis (IBC 2009 only)
* More in depth cost estimate analysis for site development
* User defined Project Types
* PDF export to Dropbox

We’re on target for December 2010 for our initial release of Architactile Inception. We believe Inception to be the first commercially available tool ever developed for preliminary project scope and conceptual budgeting and we’re very excited to see it in action. We hope you are too.

Stay tuned.

It is not simply the ability to view drawing files on the iPad that is exciting—it is the potential opening of the floodgates to many more such applications in the near future. Imagine an iPad version of Autodesk Design Review, which would allow models to be viewed and annotated in the same portable and intuitive manner as consumers currently interact with digital content on the iPad. Going further, we could even think of a Navisworks app, which, given the popularity of the application with designers as well as constructors, in the office as well as on site, would be a godsend for multi-disciplinary collaboration and design coordination. Other leading AEC vendors would also go ahead and develop iPad versions of their applications, if they are not doing so already.

She goes on to talk about the potential of using the iPad for content creation and envisions Google Sketch Up on a tablet. I have to admit, I think Sketch Up would be a lot of fun on an iPad but I still struggle with the idea of using the iPad for any sort of serious detailed design.  It reminds me of when Microsoft rolled out the Pen version of Windows a decade ago and everyone started predicting the death of the keyboard. In our Sci-Fi fantasies this sort of UI seems to make great sense but it practice it’s less practical. While the iPad’s screen is large and the touch screen is amazingly responsive – the screen is not quite big enough, and the touchscreen by it’s nature is relatively imprecise.  This in one of the reasons that Architactile is focusing on bubble diagrams – it’s a level of granularity that really works well with iPad’s touchscreen.

That said, I’ve been wrong before. What I do think lies ahead for detailed design is touchscreen enabled Macs which could combine keyboard, mouse and touch paradigms. If iPad is as successful in business as I think it will be, and as the price of touchscreen technology continues to fall, I also think we could potentially see super-sized versions of iPad. I can image a 20″ iPad being used in business and in the classroom. In the AEC space I can imagine a 24″ x 36″ tablet designed for full sized drawings – a scale at which touchscreen for detail design starts becoming really compelling. And that’s the thing, it’s not good enough to simply do detailed design on an iPad (or other tablet) – it has to offer significant and compelling value proposition over the current keyboard/mouse paradigm. It has to be faster, easier, and cheaper. At least today, the compact mobility of the iPad alone doesn’t yet outweigh the efficiency and elegance of desktop CAD and BIM – no matter how cool it might be. The good news is, this is just the beginning.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think there is great potential in touch based detail design tools, but I don’t think it’s the low hanging fruit for iPad.  While not squarely targeted at architects (but in the larger AEC ecosystem) I think vendors like Vela Systems, ProCore (iPhone) , and a la mode are headed in the right direction. I think Autodesk has a huge opportunity here too – like with design review tools as Lachmi suggests – I just hope they don’t get too bogged down in the allure of design tools. It’s just feels like a hammer/screwdriver thing to me.

The real news from Architactile’s perspective is AutoCAD® WS for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.  AutoCAD® WS is a “free mobile app that will let you view, edit, and share DWG™ files on your Apple® iPad, iPhone and iPod touch®.” and it’s coming soon to the Apple iTunes App Store.  We still don’t think the iOS family of devices is a great place to do detailed design, but we absolutely think having access to drawings on your iDevice in the field will be increasingly common and important. There are a few different solutions out there for reading and (sort of) editing DWG files on iDevices but none are particularly polished. Autodesk jumping into the fray brings credibility and reliability to iDevices as a serious tool for architects. That’s good for architects, good for Autodesk and good for Architactile.

So hooray for Autodesk!

Inception Lite is a special edition of the Inception product that is being made available for a limited time at no cost to give the architecture community an opportunity to download, evaluate and provide feedback on this innovative new tool. Inception Lite will only be available in the App Store through October.

We’re planning on releasing the full bown Inception product in the October-November timeframe.

Inception is a an Apple iPad application designed to help streamline early pre-planning of architectural projects.  It allows architects to quickly develop high level project scopes, conceptual budgets, preliminary space plans, basic code review, and ever create quick bubble diagrams.  The primary difference between the full-blown Inception product and the free Inception Lite product is that the full-blown product will be able to generate complete, client ready exhibits in PDF format that can be emailed directly from the iPad.

We hope you download Inception Lite and give it a try. Please come join us in the Users’ Forum and let us know what you think, and what you like to see.