As with all iOS apps, there is volume pricing as well as enterprise pricing for medium and large firms who want to get multiple licenses for their employees and centrally manage and deploy them.

Compared to BIMx which is free, BIMx Docs is priced at $49.99 for use on unlimited projects. I still have that app on my older iPad, and it gave me the opportunity to compare it with the new BIMx Docs app on a separate iPad mini. The new expanded BIMx Docs app is built on top of GRAPHISOFT’s original BIMx app, which continues to be available for free as it has always been. This review takes a comprehensive look at this new app and how it is different from GRAPHISOFT’s earlier BIMx app. (I didn’t venture so far as to test the app on a iPhone, but apparently, it does work on that as well with an adjusted navigation system for one-hand/thumb operation.) I tested out the app on an iPad mini, which is even smaller than a regular iPad, and I was amazed at how much understanding of a project I could get from a device I could simply slip into a purse.

It extends the scope of the viewing and navigation to 2D content as well, enabling all the models as well as the accompanying 2D drawings of a BIM project to be accessed and explored from a handheld device. GRAPHISOFT has recently released the next generation of this app, called BIMx Docs. At that time, I found it the most impressive of all the model-viewing apps that I tested, with a slick interface and intuitive controls to navigate the model. In one of my earlier articles on iPad apps for AEC, published in 2011, I provided an overview of GRAPHISOFT’s BIMx app that was designed for easy navigation of 3D building models published from ArchiCAD on the iPad.

Graphisoft bimx