In this Edition
Construction
Management Specialists
111 Pine Street, Suite 1315
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 981-9430 (San Francisco office)
9705 Cymbal Drive, Vienna, VA 22182
(415) 981-9430 (Washington, DC office)
4361 35th Street
San Diego, CA 92104
(619) 550-1187 (San Diego office)
8538 173rd Avenue NE
Redmond, WA 98052
(206) 571-0128 (Seattle office)
www.TBDconsultants.com
The Steel Market
Steve Sacks & Sam Evison
The way steel prices are moving is often a leading indicator to the way other construction material prices will go. In this article we look at how steel prices are moving and what is driving them.
At one time you would walk into a meeting and see laptops open all around the conference room table. Nowadays you are likely to see at least as many iPads or iPad-lookalikes as you’ll see laptops. The light-weight, instant-on feature, and the wireless connectivity makes tablets an ideal substitute for laptops in many situations, but they do have some limitations.
It has been said that tablets are consumers of data, rather than creators of it, and there is a good deal of truth in that. While the on-screen keyboard works well enough for the hunt-and-peck typist, it lacks the feel of a real keyboard for touch-typists. And transferring data to and from a tablet is easy if, when you connect it to a PC or Mac, it pops up as a USB drive, but if you need a special app, such as iTunes, to transfer data then the process become a bit more involved and off-putting.
Regarding business apps, if all you use regularly are office apps like Word and Excel, then the tablet may well come with the needed software, or it is readily downloadable, and possibly free. But if you have need of specialist applications, then there are a number of issues to address.
With the variety of mobile operating systems in use today, the simplest way to develop a specialist app for use on any tablet is to develop it as a Web application that can be used in the tablet’s browser. The problems with that approach is that (1) an Internet connection has to be available, and (2) the application cannot make use of special features on the tablet, such as GPS or the camera.
You can develop an application that runs directly on the tablet, and that therefore could use features such as the camera, but then you either need to limit the type of tablet, or adapt the application for a variety of operating systems and specific implementations on particular machines. With the growing implementation of the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) idea, any special application might need to be tailored for many different devices.
There are already some tablet devices that run versions of Windows, but the advent of Windows 8 will undoubtedly increase the number. Microsoft has always had a larger focus on business than Apple has, so the proportion of tablets around the conference room table is likely to increase substantially in the near future.
Beware – Cliffs Ahead
Geoff Canham, Editor
The markets have certainly been volatile recently, but business activity still continues its slow climb out of recession. What are the potential danger zones ahead? Here we take a look at a couple of them.
Design consultant: Katie Levine of Vallance, Inc.