Toolbox App is designed by Marcus Roskosch, an award winning app designer, in collaboration with RS Components and Allied Electronics. See Marcus' website to see other apps he had written. Toolbox App is based on the popular Electronic Toolbox Pro, it's functionality is tailored to the specific needs of RS and Allied customers. In 2013 we started Toolbox with a set of minitools selected by power users from our DesignSpark community, the evolution of the app is now in your hands. We built in an interface allowing to get in contact with us directly from the app and we are looking forward to receiving your suggestions, requests and feedback. Below is a log of enhancements to the App, this list will be updated with the subsequent releases.
21st July 2014 - Toolbox App version 1.1
To let RS and Allied Toolbox take full advantage of iOS 7 and even to make it compatible to the recently announced iOS 8, we had to rewrite about 70% of the app. This has provided us with a great opportunity to incorporate many other suggestions from our users and freshen up the app's design.
■ Two new minitools
The Delta Star tool can be used to convert resistor circuit values between star and delta connections. The new constant current source tool can be used to calculate and build a constant current power supply which needs to be used for high power LEDs.
■ User interface improvements
The user interface has been freshened up and supports now additional iOS 7 features such as special animations, list swiping, popover selections, the new iOS 7 keyboard and some more.
The new iOS 7 animations are used for instance, when starting and closing tools. The tool screen is now zoomed in and from its icon.
In list, like they are used in the tables tool, sub-lists can now be closed not just by pressing the back or "<" button. Instead, they can also be closed by swiping the finger from the left edge of the screen like flipping back a page of a book.
For selections, like for unit selections or for the action menu at the top, so called popup menus have been introduced. These will now no longer cover the whole screen so they are much easier to use and even look nicer.
Users will notice the lack of the so called picker in the new app version, for instance in the resistor tool. This picker did look quite nice and even gave this tool a unique design. However, the picker had some disadvantages. Most of the time, it took several taps to select a certain value e.g. when the rolls did spin past the value that should be selected. Another major disadvantage was that this picker was quite huge and covered a third of the whole screen on iPhones which means that the screen often needed to be scrolled in order to see the result values. The picker is part of iOS and iOS 7 provides the new picker which derives all of the aforementioned disadvantages but adds some more so we tested it with power users and following their positive recommendation decided to replace the picker by space and tap-saving popover selections.
To implement all those features, we had to drop IOS 5 support but the app still supports iOS 6.
However, don't worry if you don't want or can't update to iOS 6 or 7, you can still use previous version of the app as it will still be available on the AppStore for downloading and best of all, it will still get improvements via Data updates.
■ Improved action button
The action button now has a new unique icon and will now act as a real action button. Now, it always opens a popover selection with several options based on the current situation.
■ Improved "add ... to project" and printing
Instead of taking a screen-shot, now, the real values and images will be copied to the selected project or printed.
■ New unit oz/ft2
Users asked for the possibility to enter e.g. trace thickness in the PCB Trace width tool in units of oz/ft2 , which is now possible.
10th December 2013 - Toolbox App version 1.0
This is the first version of the Toolbox App, the engineering reference App from RS Components and Allied Electronics. To suit our two brands there are two separate Apps: 'RS Toolbox' and 'Allied Toolbox', the apps are identical in functionality and the only difference is branding and target market. We hope you enjoy this useful resource!