How does an architect use his iPad to get the job done and what iPad apps help get him through his day? TiPb’s iPad at work contest aims to bring you just such slices of the iPad life. Here’s DomArch’s answer and as a small token of thanks we’re sending him a $20 iTunes gift certificate. If you want to see your name up on the TiPb home page and get a gift certificate all your own, head on over to the TiPb iPad Forum and share your story now!

As an architect, I knew as soon as I saw the iPad it would be helpful for my young business, and maybe give me an edge over some of my competition. Right off the bat, I realized that it was the perfect presentation tool for showing clients my work. Unlike a laptop, the client can hold the iPad in their hands as the photo album’s built-in slide show showcases my portfolio. It’s hard to describe the difference, but it’s somehow more “personal” when they can hold the images in their hands; in addition, its less awkward than a traditional photo portfolio as well. But once I got started with it, I realized that that was the tip of the iceberg.

On the go, I can bring drawings with me as PDFs, and reference them at meetings, something I used to do with my iPhone but which is even more useful on the iPad because of the larger screen. The Adobe Ideas app and the Penultimate app have been incredibly useful for sketching out concepts and notes during presentations and meetings. I’ve been able to work on proposals and written specifications using Pages and both the on-screen keyboard and a Bluetooth keyboard. In the office, it has become my defacto email and calendar machine, allowing my desktop to become almost a true dedicated cad station.

The iPad is already more useful to me than I hoped it would be, but even better, I can see there is so much potential for better and better apps to come. I can’t wait to see what people come up with for this great device!

What about you? Are you an architect? If so, which apps do you use for your job?

What was once but an administrative possibility has become the most sublime of legal certainties: Apple has been granted the multi-touch patents.

Credited to the one, Steve Jobs, and the many, Scott Forstall and the iPhone team, the news patents are simultaneously as wide ranging as they are specifically crafted towards the implementation of one or many fingers interacting on the screen in a mobile device, with the most subtle of heuristic interpretations.

Apropos the heretofore mentioned anomaly; ergo Palm Pre’s exacting duplication of the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures and behavioral interactions and Apple’s deliberately obscure threats in their direction, these new patents provide a single, potentially catastrophic result of a singular equation: Apple has grounds to sue.

Vis a vis Palm’s own far-reaching patent portfolio in the mobile space: these remain a perplexing, perhaps equation changing variable. Through one door, a cross licensing agreement. Through the other, years if not decades of litigation.

In sum, the situation remains predictably uncertain.

(Thanks to David, Chad, and everyone who sent this in!)

Another day, another Apple patent. This one’s a biggie, the whole iPhone enchilada. Current functionality and future potentials (web clips? blogging app?) all rolled into one monstrous document, and all sitting beneath the top-tiered name of Steve Jobs. Yup. According the US Patent Office, El Jobso was the architect of the iPhone. And you know what that means!

[Carrier signal intercept...]

Upon first inspection, while preposterous, it remains equally irrefutable that recent filings, previously unrevealed but now extricated from the plethora of Apple applied patents, demonstrate undeniably, if indefensibly, that no mere hardware engineer, software programmer, or industrial designer envisioned the integral experience of multiple touch-based interface melded to gloss-black glass and immaculate aluminum. No. Only the One, Steven P. Jobs, through systematic application of unparalleled will, was and remains sole and primary architect of the harmonious singularity that is iPhone.

[Signal terminated...]

Hit the read link for the usual diagrams and verbiage.

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