« October 2011 | Main

You can find Some really useful new tools for engineers in Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market. I found more than a hundred apps in the Apple store designed specifically for engineering calculations. Some are for single industries such as cement, metals, electric power and plastics. You can also find broader apps for engineering disciplines such as civil, electrical and chemical engineering.

Chitra Sethi, Managing Editor at ASME.org, thinks there is a market for a lot more engineering-specific apps. She reports finding five mechanical engineering apps for the iPhone that she recommends.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of free and low-cost apps now on the market, you might expect she would have found more. Certainly the productivity gains, portability and ease-of-use that engineering apps would afford suggest the demand for engineering apps will grow. She cites a TechCrunch report that predicts the mobile app market will be worth $25 billion in 2015.

You can find some apps now that are designed for engineers in the process industries and those who do calculations for applications where dry bulk materials are used. We recently added K-Tron's popular K-Convert unit conversion tool to both the App Store and the Android Market. Designed especially for engineers, K-Convert provides you with the unit conversions common in processes where powders and other bulk materials are employed.

You can download the free K-Convert for your iPhone / iPad here at the App Store , or get K-Convert for Android here. For those who still favor a desktop version, the classic K-Convert for Windows PCs remains available here for download.

You can share your own favorite engineering apps by commenting here. And let us know if there is an engineering app on your wish list that you'd like to see developed.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator