What's new in ix 2.0

No plan? Scan the house and ix draws one

ix Scan, the room-scanning app for LiDAR iPhones and iPads, now signs in with your ix account, lists your projects or starts a new one, and sends each room it scans. A scan sent to a project with no plan draws that plan by itself, to scale: the walls, doors and windows, the room names and areas, and the furniture as plan symbols. Each floor you name on the phone (Level 1, Level 2, Basement) gets its own sheet. On the Projects page, "New project from iPhone scan" makes the project and shows the code in one step.

Tip. Outer walls come in as concrete block and inner walls as drywall. The sheet says that is assumed, and you can change a wall's material afterwards like any other wall.

Already wired? Mark what is there

While you scan, aim the crosshair at a data port, TV, speaker, outlet, camera, access point or keypad that is already installed and press Mark. It arrives in ix as an existing device at its measured spot, with its height and a photo if you took one. In Properties, choose Keep, Move or Remove: the drawing marks it (E), (R) or (D) the way construction documents do, a moved item shows where it came from, and none of them is put on the Bill of Materials or the quote. A cable run to an existing device still counts.

The heights the scan measured are used

A scanned room keeps its measured wall heights, window sills and heads, door heights and ceiling height. The 3D views and speaker coverage use them instead of a standard height. A wall nobody measured keeps the standard height, and the 3D view says so.

The whole building in 3D

In the 3D view, switch from Sheet to Building. Under Levels, say which sheets are floors, how tall each floor is, and one point that lines up from floor to floor. The floors then stack, with the plan drawn under the walls. Use Isolate and Cut above to look inside a floor, the Translucency slider and Section to see through it, and the compass and tilt controls to turn it. Click a device to name it. Wi-Fi can be shown through the floors at 2.4 and 5 GHz, using the published ITU floor-loss figures for the construction you choose.

And a lot of smaller things

Wi-Fi 7 access points with their published coverage, and each access point now only covers the bands it really has. Every control in the app now uses the app's own typeface, and the bars fit iPad screens. PNG exports now include highlighter strokes. Undo after importing a scan takes back the whole import in one step, and a copied existing device becomes a new one you can quote.