The most touted, and best, new feature introduced in version 7.2 is Dynamic Help, a special Inspector Pane window that lets you see important information about the tools you're using when you’re drawing. The Inspector Pane includes diagramming tips and application features that relate to the area of the program they’re using. This helps speed up the drawing process.

Also, with the release of ConceptDraw 7.2 there's a larger focus on its web publishing capabilities. For example,there's beefed up HTML export, which lets you create web pages based on specifically designed templates. Also new in ConceptDraw 7.2: an improved SVG export that produces drawings that can be viewed and scaled in any web browser.

ConceptDraw packs a lot of punch; however, its learning curve is a little steep. The "Quick Start" wizards help a lot, but the app does pack over 5,000 shapes and a library of task-specific templates in 20 categories. (You can also draw from scratch using the software’s collection of shapes includes ellipses, rectangles, line segments, sectors, arcs, and splines.) Still, version 7.3 has streamlined the interface a bit, making it more user friendly for newbies. There are now customizable toolbars and well designed inspectors, but the interface still seems a bit busy.

The update maintains the solid features of ConceptDraw. There's a set of useful vector drawing tools, smart connectors that make lines stay linked to their shapes, custom connection points and the ability to use unlimited number of layers to organize related shapes in one document page. You can use the standard color palette or a custom palette. What's more, you can set a palette for a shape, its text or other attributes or document. A new drop tool makes it easier to choose the color of text, line or filling.

In ConceptDraw 7, you can create custom properties for shapes. A shape can act as a visual database field that stores data you can retrieve in a report. This comes in handy for creating automatic reports based on your drawings.

ConceptDraw 7's shapes are customizable. You can assign custom properties to them, add user defined context menus, and create links to other shapes, files or programs. ConceptDraw Basic scripts can be associated with shapes, which offers a lot of useful control over them.

ConceptDraw's texture fill function lets you create objects by filling ConceptDraw shapes with one of the preset textures or a raster image of your own. With the alpha-channel (transparency) feature, the slider next to Hide Custom Color button allows you to add transparency to your objects. You move the slider to the right to increase the object transparency and to the left to decrease it.

Another sweet feature: in case you used Visio before and have switched to ConceptDraw, ConceptDraw 7 supports import of files from Visio, using the XML format. So you don't lose your work done in Visio.

ConceptDraw lets you export to PDF (though when I tried the resolution was poor), but you can't still can't import such files. Hopefully, this will be fixed in a future update. Also, the Windows version supports the DXF format, but the Mac version doesn't (although that's purportedly in the works). What's more, it crashed on me a couple of times when I tried to export SWF file formats.

ConceptDraw 7.3 costs US$299. Upgrades from previous versions (prior to 7.x) are $99; a demo is available at the CS Odessa web site. It's Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It works with Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10.