GraphPad – Engineering Design app for iPad

GraphPad is the latest discovery of a design-drawing tool useful for architects, engineers and other CAD users in the field who need draw and would like to do so accurately on their Apple iPad.

Developed by Robert Shawhan, a veteran Oracle developer who dipped into Apple’s world while between development projects at Oracle, GraphPad is his new creation. Robert has lots of praise for Apple’s technologies and development stack, as he puts it, and has been very impressed with the support he finds for first time developers for Apple’s technologies.

GraphPad is one among many new technical drawing tools for Apple’s iPad but in looking quickly through his tutorials and videos it is clear that this application has some unique strengths. One particular one we will point out here is the way in which you move a point or vertex with your finger using multi-touch.

01 - GraphPad - is one of the newer technical drawing applications for Apple's iPad. Today Apple will be announcing the next iPad or iPad 2, and with that new hardware and its performance capabilities we want to draw some attention to the types of applications that CAD professionals will want to run on it.

As veteran CAD users have often pointed out to us in emails, a human finger is much larger than a point on a computer screen, thus making it difficult to select and move various vertices. In GraphPad, you select a point, then draw a rectangle (a marquee) that contains that point and touch the selection rectangle and drag it to move the point, thereby allowing the user to see the vertex (next to your finger) you are moving.

We will be reviewing GraphPad in a future product review later this spring.

New Updates in GraphPad

For current GraphPad users or prospective users here are some of the latest updates and fixes:

• V1.0.6 will contain the following improvements
• Copy / Group menu is now less sensitive to movement
• Paste menu less sensitive to movement
• Delete based upon selection area
• Circles have been modifiable start and end angles (arcs)
• Dimensions need to recalculate with Group Changes
• Dimensions Need to recalculate with Group Changes
• Copy Includes Groups
• Modified Dimension do not recalculate

There are several bug fixes as well.

To learn more about GraphPad go here to its main website or look it up inside the Apple App Store.