Here's an e-mail comment from Pete Burnett of Charlotte, NC:

I have been a loyal Smart Draw customer for several years now. I purchased versions 6 & 7.

I tried SD 2007 when it first came out and didn't like it for reasons I can't exactly recall but after trying it for an hour or so I quickly unloaded it and am back to using version 7.

They have now sent me a 60 day free trial offer and a $99.00 price to upgrade. But, if I can't open any work that I create for 60 days back in my version 7 then that makes the trial not very attractive.

Versions 6 & 7 have bugs and annoyances too. For example, I might have a bunch of text boxes with arrows pointing to various things. Every text box is sized how I want it. Then when I hit "Spell Check" on one box it then goes and spell checks all the boxes and resizes them causing me to have to go back through and redo everything. Often I just do "Select All" then to the text menu and resize them all back to neutral that way.
I wrote Smart Draw about it not long ago and they said it was a known bug but didn’t offer much else as far as when a fix could be expected.

I offered to do beta testing for them in exchange for a free version of SD 2007, but no response from them. That didn’t go well with me being a loyal customer and multiple purchaser. They can easily look it up to see my track record. I have even sent them examples of my work and praising them as well as making suggestions, they never responded. No customer likes getting the cold shoulder. Here I am buying multiple versions of the program, frequently sending in suggestions and trying to help them and they blow me off when I offer them more free help and testing. I use this product almost every day! Dumb move from a business stand point. But now I’m probably glad that I didn’t get involved with SD2007 from reading other’s reviews.

Another annoyance: Say I have a text box and an arrow. Both carefully positioned where I want them. The text box is brought to front so it's over the arrow hiding the stem. I go to make a change to the arrow then it brings it to the front when I did not tell it to. I then have to go and replace the text box back to front. This is annoying.

If you type anything in the text box after you set the size, the text box size changes for no reason - annoying.

If you insert a large photo, the program slows down to a jerky crawl. Not really useable unless you reduce size. I have a recent computer and thought that maybe it was just because I was using an older computer but not so, still does same performance.

I have contacted Smart Draw quite a bit over the years whenever I find an annoying bug and also asking for a few very simple features for contractors but they are not responsive to that.

I agree - for a small company with a potentially good product, they seem to have issues regarding engaging and working with loyal customers and implementing feedback. This is now causing them to get negative feedback on the net and that can kill a small company. Although the CEO coming on and explaining a few things did help damage control in my mind anyway. It helped.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some very useful features in Smart Draw but it seems like there is a lot of fluff too, stuff that I don’t need and will never use. But I’m trying to give Smart Draw every chance. They just don’t seem to want it.

I am a contractor and use SD almost exclusively for making photo diagrams (diagramming in photos). Some are fairly simple and others more complex. If anyone knows of another good program to do drawings in photos that I should try, please let me know at DrawingProgramReccomend@yahoo.com