Focus Multimedia Ltd Create Your Own Calendars Home and Lifestyle Applications

The program is packed with design tips. If you're looking to create a garden, you might want a small city one; a formal landscape or a garden for thoughts, which is deliberately intended as a tranquil retreat. Once you've selected your plants and trees, you can test how big they will get. By pressing the play button, everything you have planted starts to grow on your screen and you can easily see what size it will become over a number of years.

There are handy professional tips as well. If you are looking to choose specific grass for your lawn, you are advised to take into account climate, growth speeds, watering, foot traffic and maintenance.

Overall this is a detailed program and it gives you enormous choice including more than 2,200 plants to choose from and you can even use innovative tools like the shadow caster to help you plan where shadows fall.

Whether you are a professional designer or a gardening enthusiast, this program will let you design the garden you want without you even having to pick up a spade. --Justin Hunt

There are several ways to play a game. Single players can play against the computer. The computer's skill level can be set at various levels--novice, weak, moderate, intermediate, expert, and there's a custom option, which allows players to set search depth (the number of moves ahead the computer is allowed to plan a move and calculate every possible move you could make in response) from 1 to 48, and capture aggressiveness (which measures how aggressively the engine chooses a capturing move over an equally effective non-capturing move) from 2 to 12. Two players can play against each other on one computer. Alternatively, players on different computers can play via a telephone network, LAN or the Internet (via Winsock). The setup documentation is good.

For beginners, the help files include chess rules, and there are in-play hints available. More advanced players wishing to improve their skills may wish to import a PGN (Portable Game Notation) game. Portable Game Notation is a standard way of describing chess games in a computer-readable format. A number of files with PGN notation are included in Corel Chess, and others are available on the Internet and can be imported. The included PGN games range from the mid-1800s to the 1990s. While the program doesn't allow users to play against the masters, it does allow users to scrutinize the games in live-motion, pause and fast-forward through thousands of championship chess games. In a world where PCs are more common than chess-boards, Corel Chess renders the history and experience of this complex game vividly. Kasparov wannabes take note. --Kathleen Keefe

The only instructions are contained on the sheet inside the CD's plastic sleeve and show how to get it to work--how to run set-up, access the user guide for information and user support, and how to exit the program. It therefore goes without saying that the user-guide instructions contained in the program itself should be read and absorbed before beginning. It is a good idea to print these off for easy reference as they are excellent--concise, comprehensive and easy to follow, using actual screenshots from the program with written instructions and explanations of the terms used. Particularly helpful are the summaries of each step.

Once you've read the instructions, you'll be ready to master the software and decide what to stitch. Choose the design from 700 templates in different categories ranging from alphabets and animals to signs of the Zodiac. You can then view the selected template in three different formats and the only step left is to print your creation with a list of what is necessary to complete it (remember to refer to the user guide). Once your preparation is complete, begin your stitching and enjoy.

Tailored towards the beginner, this is a superb starter program. The instructions included are superlative and will result in many happy hours sewing. --Susan Naylor

The software has plenty of useful features, such as the ability to choose colours from the ranges of popular thread manufacturers, and choose popular types of fabric so you can get your design just right. Complete newcomers to cross-stitch should find the tutorial very useful. This teaches the basics using both text and video: the videos make it particularly easy to see how to create different kinds of stitch. If you would like to create a sampler but don't know quite where to start, there is a guide which covers every stage of the process up to starting to stitch.

More experienced users who might normally leave a tutorial to one side may like to delve into it to examine the section called Inspiring Stories. Here, in true magazine style, you can learn how cross-stitch has changed some people's live for the better. Cross-stitch is a very popular hobby, but lots of devotees rely on pre-made kits. If you would like to get away from kits and do your own thing, Cross Stitcher Card and Pattern Creator can make it happen. --Sandra Vogel