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Articles by Adam Stone

Other than my personal life and hobbies I am all about the system integration and A/V industry. I started in 1981 as a “TV delivery specialist” for the Good Guys a west coast CE chain. From there I started my own big dish satellite installation company which morphed into a home theater installation company in the early 90’s. I got out of the installation business in 1996 and went to work for an electrical contractor as project manager of their residential division where I was exposed to the complexities of old school/analog job costing, estimating, blueprints and project scheduling. Being a long time PC geek and creator of some database driven estimating tools I knew that there had to be a better way to deal with these complex projects. During the course of my employment there I was exposed to Visio as an easy to use drawing tool. After spending some time with it I realized that I could hook it up to a database and automate many of the disparate processes I needed to do to accomplish my tasks. That let to the formation of my current company D-Tools which is the leader in the marketplace with thousands of companies using our design, engineering and business management tools. My direct contact information is on the About tab.

SuperSmart Title Block

02/18/2013 – 12:26 pm | Comments | 756 views

I am running put of adjectives that describe the new Visio shapes that I have been working on.  By nature most of the previous D-Tools/Visio shapes are “smart” but these new shapes are really a …

6 in1 Super Speaker Shape

01/31/2013 – 1:37 pm | Comments | 885 views

Just finished putting the final touches on the new 6 in 1 Visio speaker shape.  As the title describes this shape will reconfigure based on the speaker types Bookshelf, Center, Floor, Subwoofer, Electrostatic and Electrostatic …

Uber Lighting Plan Icon Shapes

01/25/2013 – 2:26 pm | Comments | 620 views

Just put the finishing touches on the Universal Plan Lighting Shape, actually two shapes.  It started out as a single smart shape but I realized that it would be easier to use if it was …

New Electrical Smart Outlet Plan Icon Shape

01/15/2013 – 10:42 am | Comments | 938 views

Like it’s super smart brothers and sisters this shape can easily morph from five different shape types and three different mount types for an impressive 15:1 efficiency ratio.  This shape is a perfect solution for …

New Electrical “Smart Switch” Icon

01/07/2013 – 2:10 pm | Comments | 1,355 views

A couple of months ago I introduced some new concepts for plan icon shapes with our new Universal Plan Icon Shape.  That shape got me thinking about how I could make more specific plan icon …

New Universal Plan Icon Shape

11/14/2012 – 1:08 pm | Comments | 350 views

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about ways to improve the plan icons in SIX and what could be done to make them more efficient.  The Plan icon that ships with SIX …

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