I agree with Hilary. A new program should be easy to use and have an assortment of colored mats in changeable colors and patterns. Often times it is REALLY hard to find mat colors that match your photos. Fonts should be of different styles as there are already stickers available for the simple styles. I also would go for the hard to find images for die cuts, such as race cars, bikes-(I don't know why this is such an under produced item, every child I know has had at least one bike, especially BMX bikes. My son had well over 15.) motorcycles, tv's, computers-lots of christmas gifts are these items, Cds, fake money, birds, large flowers with good graphics, etc. These are just a few of the items I have found hard to come by. As for cutting out the shapes, they have to be big enough that they are not a royal pain to cut out and small enough not to dwarf the pages. Heritage items are another biggy. If you did a section devoted to black and white die cuts ( or the darker muted colors like maroon, dark green, or gold and silver) with items from every decade, starting at the 1900's to present for example: the old gas pumps, ice cream palors, old cars, the different wars American's have fought (this would be a big seller since MANY of the older photo shots were of men in uniforms,) a rosy the riveter page, memorial tribute pages etc... These items are almost impossible to find, and yet millions of photos were taken during these times and scrapbook makers are now having a hard time finding die cuts, pages or stickers that fit those eras and photos. I too would be willing to test drive any new software or be a guinea pig for ideas. Penny

ppl have mentioned using glass eye here before, I don't grasp the reason for that. You can enlarge any photo and outline different colors and shades... and if you are doing glass on glass you just lay it under your substrate and if not just use carbon paper to transfer it. unless you are going to make the square tile pixelated things with the grids... I think you can buy craft kits for things like that

I have used Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 9 quite a bit. I don't remember what I paid, but I think it was $59, or maybe $99. If you search here for ecranny you can see some if the designs I made. What I like best about it is you can generate a 3D walkthrough that looks like you are walking around the house with a camcorder. Another one I use is Google Sketchup 7 (the free version). With this I can do detailed designs, but this is more of a CAD tool so I use it mainly for doing cabinet construction plans.

There is definitely an advantage to CAD as one can create objects, as opposed to just drawing pictures comprised of lines. Sketchup is the free or low cost CAD program, but it has a high enough learning curve to be discouraging to many. Though there are tutorials online. It might be one of those things that if you grasp some of the basics, it will begin to "flow." I don't know; I've never made it that far. Though it is just drawing, I like using MS Paint for plan and visualization, as it is simple ... good for anyone who understands perspective drawing. A simple base plan, since it is mainly lines, can be drawn on it with any computer, using the line and shape tools. The app has a built-in grid and measuring guide that can be toggled on and off. (The default scale is 1"=10', but it doesn't tell you that.) Compared to pencil and paper, it saves a lot of time if needing to erase, or when copying elements. And it is much cleaner. Since it's just drawing, it is not as precise as cad. For visualization, you can open any landscape photograph in Paint and draw over it, and copy and paste elements within it. However, since that process is not just drawing straight lines, it requires a touchscreen and stylus in order to use the program well.