STICKY: DIAL is looking for you to make DIALux better
I really do apologize for the delay in posting to this blog, I have been involved in a blitz of graphic work, photoshoots, and catalog design for my company. 
I’m back now and I have a very interesting development for the DIAlux community. During my hiatus, I received an email from Willi Bremecker who is the Team Leader for Sales at DIAL which is the company that produces DIALux. He is asking me, and therefore you the DIALux community as a whole what type of DIALux tutorials we would want. How cool is that!?! 
I think that this is a tremendous opportunity for us to contribute to a terrific free program that we all use and love so I am asking you now to think about what it is we want and to thoughtfully comment to this post for discussion which I will forward to Mr. Bremecker, hopefully for implementation. As Mr. Bremecker requests in his email, if there are features or lighting calculations that you feel are missing from the program, please comment on those too. Since the number one complaint about DIALux seems to be the lack of tutorials and/or documentation, now is the time for us to get it together and let them know how we feel and what needs to be done to make this the single best lighting calculations program out there.
I am posting Mr. Bremecker’s email to me:
Hello Craig,
my name is Willi Bremecker, I am the Team Leader Sales at DIAL and until
last year I was responsible for the DIALux development as the Team Leader
Software Development. So I read your article with great interest and I am
happy that you like our work. Also the reactions by your readers is
impressive. Of course I could help you with any help for all your
questions. For example the tutorials. What do you need ? Would you like to
have video tutorials or a document with pictures like “My first Project.
My second Project….”?
When we designed DIALux we tried to keep it as simple as possible. During
more than 10 years of development more and more wishes of users and
demands from the market were implemented. Because of this continuous
growth it is no longer as easy to use as it should. So a few years ago we
designed “The guide”. The Icon Bar on the right hand side of DIALux. You
can select what type of design you are going to make, for example interior
or exterior and than you follow the guide from the top to the bottom. Just
click on those Icons and DIALux enables you to do it. The other thing we
had and still have in mind is to keep the right mouse button the most
important feature of the software. If you want to do something with an
object, make a right click on it. The context menu offers those functions
which are available for that object.
The included manual and online help (F1) is describing all the available
functions but I can imagine it is not enough. So tell me, what type of
tutorials and what topics you want to be explained and I will check what I
can do. The next week there is the light and building fair in Frankfurt,
Germany. We will be present in Hall 3.0 booth A80. So for all the
interested guys, just drop in and check out for the latest version.
By the way. Is there anything you are missing for the american market? Any
diagram or value that has to be calculated? Just tell me about your needs.
We are thinking of going to the Lightfair in New York next year. Maybe we
have to prepare something for it.
Regards,
Willi
Kudos to DIAL for looking to the community for feedback and we hope to get you some real positive, useful information real soon.
12 comments May 23, 2008
Here is another example of the power of 
is an concept OEM LED Undercabinet lighting fixture that my company, International Light Technologies is manufacturing for a customer (the one depicted in the image is an earlier version concept). When you combine the powerful and fast modeling capabilities of Sketchup with the awesome non-biased rendering power of Kerkthea, you have a rather inexpensive but immensely powerful tool for rapid visualization. 
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. Think of it as a quick primer on the subject. Includes a neat little glossary of commonly encountered terms when dealing with a building’s daylight plan.
If you’re a designer who works predominantly on digital projects (graphic designer, illustrator, lighting designer, photographer, etc..) and you have Microsoft Access 2002 or better and are struggling with organizing your projects (as I do frequently), then you might want to checkout the Digital Design Project Manager database from Six Bicks Press. This fantastic piece of software allows you to enter project information, keep track of clients, contacts, digital assets as well as asset license information, deadlines, and more. The software has full reporting, does internal backups, has user preferences, reminders, and way more stuff than I can talk about here and it’s inexpensive! You can pick it up from the 
ps for amusement park rides or lack thereof I thought you might find a recently published article from Funworld Magazine in which I was quoted interesting. Hopefully you find it interesting, I enjoyed being interviewed by Ms. Gable and I think the article illustrates some of the pros and cons of adopting LEDs within the amusement ride industry. Give it a read.
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Let’s chock this next one up to architectural “accessories” lighting, perhaps? Whatever you want to call it, these were neat enough to mention here so make sure you go take a look at these, OK?
